Use APScheduler in Flask to implement scheduled tasks

Scheduling scheduled tasks is a common feature in background applications. The APScheduler framework is a framework commonly used in Python to manage and schedule scheduled tasks. The framework is powerful and supports multiple scheduling methods. This article demonstrates how to integrate APSchedule in a Flask web application.

In this article, we use Flask-APScheduler to integrate APScheduler.

Introduction to the example

In this article, using a simple Flask example, assume that the project structure is as follows:

+ app
   __init__.py
   jobs.py
main.py

Flask applications are started by the app module, and specific scheduled tasks are written in the jobs.py file in the app module.

Install Flask-APScheduler

Execute:

pip install Flask-APScheduler

Define the scheduled task to perform

In the example, we simply define a method for printing one line of text

def job1():
    print('job1 running....')

Define scheduling rules

In the init.py file of the app module, we initialize Flask and start APScheduler. By using the Config object, we define a scheduling rule that defines job1 execution at 6:50 a.m. from Monday to Friday.

Note: The func definition in JOBS must be written to correspond to import * from app.jobs, otherwise it is easy to get the module not found error

from flask import Flask
from flask_apscheduler import APScheduler

from app.jobs import *

class Config(object):
    JOBS = [
        {
            'id': 'job1',
            'func': 'app:job1',
            'args': '',
            'trigger': {
                'type': 'cron',
                'day_of_week':"mon-fri",
                'hour':'6',
                'minute':'50',
                'second': '0'
            }
        }
    ]

app = Flask(__name__)

scheduler = APScheduler()
app.config.from_object(Config())
scheduler.init_app(app)
scheduler.start()

@app.route('/')
def index():
    return 'hello'