Comments on: Django cron on Webfaction

By: Mark

Mark — Fri, 14 May 2010 07:24:02 +0000

Custom Commands also have an advantage… they fit in your application directory structure. Why is that an Advantage, they will be packaged up nicely… and easy to find, also you have help property to report usage.

so later down the line…

./manage.py help

will show you your custom command.

By: Peter@Home Computers

Peter@Home Computers — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 16:43:19 +0000

Using custom commands with Django helped me in many issues. It’s really like that hammer and nails allegory.

By: Verkaufswagen

Verkaufswagen — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 20:15:26 +0000

Be aware that the article dates back from 2007, lots of django versions in the past.

By: Urlaub Sardinien

Urlaub Sardinien — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 06:44:07 +0000

I also had problem with Django before but the custom commands helps me better, like what “No” said, for me it is more efficient and easy to understand.

By: Jj

Jj — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 23:16:42 +0000

+1 for django-command-extensions.

Be aware that the article dates back from 2007, lots of django versions in the past.

By: pytechd

pytechd — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 19:12:12 +0000

The article from James was written prior to custom manage.py commands; as was the “runscript” patch.

By: No'

No' — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 09:27:47 +0000

oh, and I must add… when you start using custom commands, it looks like a hammer, and every problem looks like a nail. ;op

By: No'

No' — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 09:26:14 +0000

> How do you mean a *lot* more efficient? Does it run faster or less memory, or just more convenient/standardized?

a – your sys.path + os.environ changes are a very ugly hack. yes, it works, but it’s quite un-pythonic.

b – this hack is not portable. if you want to run the same job in 2 different projects, you’ll have to edit the sys.path items. And if you improve your source script, you’ll see it’s pretty painful to keep all your copies up to date.

c – custom commands are classes. And as every python class, you can import / extend / inherit them. I don’t want to argue, but Object-oriented is far better from a programmer perspective. less code, more leverage.

d – these classes have helpers to add options, and extra-arguments. say you want to make a daily, weekly, monthly backup of your database via a cron. Will you write 3 different scripts? no, you’ll build one with the appropriate argument. And you won’t have to reinvent the argument parsing, etc. it’s all done very easily.

By: Kamu

Kamu — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 03:44:51 +0000

Hullo!

I wonder if you have found this already? http://code.google.com/p/django-command-extensions/

The commands of interest to you in this context would be ‘runscript’ and the ‘runjobs’ (which is designed to be used with cron as seen in http://code.google.com/p/django-command-extensions/wiki/JobsScheduling )

I hope this is of some help.

Kamu

By: Dustin

Dustin — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 20:19:43 +0000

No’: Thanks for the tip. I wasn’t aware of custom commands. How do you mean a *lot* more efficient? Does it run faster or less memory, or just more convenient/standardized?