This package makes it possible to automatically run background tasks in App Engine. This package is compatible with any App Engine framework; it requires modification to app.yaml to wire up a couple of URLs.
There are other packages that run tasks in dev mode, but they are written for Django (http://appengine-cookbook.appspot.com/recipe/automatically-run-tasks-from-task-queue-on-development-sdk/) or they require screen scraping and related dependencies (http://www.gae123.com/articles/gaet/run-tasks.html). Please check out those projects if they sound better suited to your needs.
simplejson (http://pypi.python.org/pypi/simplejson/2.1.1) To install:
easy_install simplejson
Drop this package somewhere in your app, then add handlers to app.yaml:
- url: /devtaskrunner/.*
script: path/to/handler.py
Note: the development server must be running to execute tasks.
To run all of the currently queued tasks:
python path/to/devtaskrunner/runtasks.py
To periodically check and run all of the queued tasks:
python path/to/devtaskrunner/runtasks.py -r
You can configure things like the url of your dev server, and how often the process should check for new tasks. For more command-line options, run:
python path/to/devtaskrunner/runtasks.py -h
Apache 2.0. See the included file called LICENSE for information.