Delaying tasks is not obvious and as always when Celery comes in we must take care about few things.

Countdown

First and the easiest way for task delaying is to use countdown argument. Countdown takes Int and stands for the delay time expressed in seconds.

my_task.apply_async(countdown=10)

Pros

• easy to use
• readable

Cons

• doesn’t work when enable_utc is set to False and timezone is defined

Estimated Time of Arrival

Second way is to use eta argument, which takes exact date and time of execution. Works perfectly with native datetime object, date as String or even Pendulum instance.

my_task.apply_async(eta=datetime.now(pytz.timezone("Europe/Warsaw"))
my_task.apply_async(eta="2018-02-19 13:41:14+01:00")
my_task.apply_async(eta=pendulum.now("Europe/Warsaw"))

Pros

• readable
• precise
• works with timezones

Cons

• require more work

Visibility timeout

Sometimes there is a need for very long timeout for example 8 hours or more. For such long timeouts Celery require additional configuration.

app = Celery("project_name", broker="redis://localhost:6379", backend="redis://localhost:6379")

max_timeout_in_seconds = 21600  # 6h this is arbitrary
app.conf.broker_transport_options = {"visibility_timeout": max_timeout_in_seconds}

Without visibility_timeout, tasks with very long timeout may be dropped or will be executed multiple times. Once or twice for every active worker.