App Platform Flask rq worker

Hi there,

I believe that you should be able to use a worker App Platform component in production, rather than manually starting them from a console. The DigitalOcean App Platform supports running background workers as part of your application.

For Flask applications using rq as the task queue, you’d typically want these workers to run continuously to process queued tasks.

Here’s how you can set up an rq worker in DigitalOcean’s App Platform using the app specification:

1. App Specification:

   In your App Spec (do-app.yaml), you’ll typically have a section for your main web service (Flask app). To add a worker, you would include another service component just for the rq worker. It would look something like this:

services:
- name: web
  environment_slug: python
  github:
    repo: your_username/your_repo
    branch: master
    deploy_on_push: true
  run_command: gunicorn app:app
  http_port: 5000
  ...

workers:
- name: rq-worker
  environment_slug: python
  github:
    repo: your_username/your_repo
    branch: master
    deploy_on_push: true
  run_command: rq worker app-tasks
  ...

In the above, under the workers section:

• name: A unique name for this worker.
• environment_slug: The runtime environment for your worker. If your app uses Python, it would be python.
• github: Points to your code repository. This should be the same as your main web app because the worker is just a different process running off the same codebase.
• run_command: The command to start the rq worker. Based on your description, it’s rq worker app-tasks.

Note that the above is just an example, you would need to add your complete app specs configuration.

2. Redis Connection:

   Ensure that your Flask application and the rq setup have the correct Redis connection details. If you’re using a managed Redis instance from DigitalOcean or any other provider, ensure that your worker and Flask app have access to it.

3. Deploy:

   Once you’ve defined your worker in your app spec, you can push the changes to your GitHub repository. If deploy_on_push is set to true, the App Platform will automatically deploy the new configuration. Your rq worker will start automatically and begin processing tasks.

Hope that this helps!

Best,

Bobby