The sequence I would like to accomplish:
Should I open a new thread inside of model.py to execute my functions? If so, how do I do this?
As shown in this answer you can use the threading package to perform an asynchronous task. Everyone seems to recommend Celery, but it is often overkill for performing simple but long running tasks. I think it's actually easier and more transparent to use threading.
Here's a simple example for asyncing a crawler:
#views.py import threading from .models import Crawl def startCrawl(request): task = Crawl() task.save() t = threading.Thread(target=doCrawl,args=[task.id]) t.setDaemon(True) t.start() return JsonResponse({'id':task.id}) def checkCrawl(request,id): task = Crawl.objects.get(pk=id) return JsonResponse({'is_done':task.is_done, result:task.result}) def doCrawl(id): task = Crawl.objects.get(pk=id) # Do crawling, etc. task.result = result task.is_done = True task.save() Your front end can make a request for startCrawl to start the crawl, it can make an Ajax request to check on it with checkCrawl which will return true and the result when it's finished.
Update for Python3:
The documentation for the threading library recommends passing the daemon property as a keyword argument rather than using the setter:
t = threading.Thread(target=doCrawl,args=[task.id],daemon=True) t.start() Update for Python <3.7:
As discussed here, this bug can cause a slow memory leak that can overflow a long running server. The bug was fixed for Python 3.7 and above.
Here's an example of what you're describing.
User sends request Django receives => spawns a thread to do something else. main thread finishes && other thread finishes ... (later upon completion of both tasks) response is sent to user as a package. Better way:
User sends request Django receives => lets Celery know "hey! do this!" main thread finishes response is sent to user ...(later) user receives balance of transaction 
If you don't want to add some overkill framework to your project, you can simply use subprocess.Popen:
def my_command(request): command = '/my/command/to/run' # Can even be 'python manage.py somecommand' subprocess.Popen(command, shell=True) command = '/other/command/to/run' subprocess.Popen(command, shell=True) return HttpResponse(status=204) [edit] As mentioned in the comments, this will not start a background task and return the HttpResponse right away. It will execute both commands in parallel, and then return the HttpResponse once both are complete. Which is what OP asked.
/bin/sleep 15 (will take 15 seconds) or /bin/sleep 60 or /bin/sleep 900 && echo 'hello' > /tmp/tmptest123 (will timeout and not finish).
subprocess will let you run multi-threaded functions and return the http response after those are completed.