Scheduled job from Flask application

Question

I am hoping to gain a basic understanding of scheduled task processes and why things like Celery are recommended for Flask.

My situation is a web-based tool which generates spreadsheets based on user input. I save those spreadsheets to a temp directory, and when the user clicks the "download" button, I use Flask's "send_from_directory" function to serve the file as an attachment. I need a background service to run every 15 minutes or so to clear the temp directory of all files older than 15 minutes.

My initial plan was a basic python script running in a while(True) loop, but I did some research to find what people normally do, and everything recommends Celery or other task managers. I looked into Celery and found that I also need to learn about redis, and I need to apparently host redis in a unix environment. This is a lot of trouble for a script that just deletes files every 15 minutes.

I'm developing my Flask app locally in Windows with the built-in development server and deploying to a virtual machine on company intranet with IIS. I'm learning as I go, so please explain why this much machinery is needed to regularly call a script that simply deletes things. It seems like a vast overcomplication, but as I said, I'm trying to learn as I go so I want to do/learn it correctly.

Thanks!

Answer 1

You wouldn't use Celery or redis for this. A cron job would be perfectly appropriate.

Celery is for jobs that need to be run asynchronously but in response to events in the main server processes. For example, if a sign up form requires sending an email notification, that would be scheduled and run via Celery so as not to block the main web response.