Automatically starting task queue for django-background-tasks

Problem(May be): The CMD instruction in your docker file executes commands sequentially. Since runserver runs indefinitely and the command process_tasks never gets a chance to start.

The problem you are facing right now with django-background-tasks not starting automatically in the docker container due to the background work.Your current approach with CMD might not be the optimal solution and you could try some alternatives like:

If I were in your problem then I would choose supervisor or celery to run the background task simultaneously.

1. Supervisor: You have to install process manager like supervisor in your docker container.Supervisord will ensure both runserver and process_tasks run in the background simultaneously.

RUN pip install supervisor # Supervisor configuration COPY supervisord.conf /etc/supervisor/conf.d/ CMD ["supervisord", "-n"] 

N.B: You have to create supervisord.conf file with configurations for both runserver and process_tasks. You can google it for this.

2. Celery: Django background tasks can be integrated with Celery, a powerful distributed task queue. It offers more features and control over background processing but requires additional configurations.

I hope you will get some ideas to solve this problem. I hope you will enjoy Python/Django ecosystem :)

Ref:

1. https://imamhossainroni.me/supercharge-your-process-management-using-supervisor
2. http://supervisord.org/configuration.html
3. Python/django application not running with supervisord

The second command after the && is only executed when the first one has ended. As python manage.py runserver runs until it is interrupted, python manage.py process_tasks never gets executed.

You have the following options:

1. Run python manage.py process_tasks in a different container.
2. Write a shell script that runs the commands in parallel, see https://stackoverflow.com/a/58861363/92106.
3. Use a process manager such as circus or encab.