kennethreitz.org/data/software/background.md

Background: Simple Background Tasks

Background lets you run Python functions in background threads with a single decorator. No task queue. No message broker. No configuration. Just @background.task and you're done.

$ uv pip install background

What It Looks Like

import time
import background

@background.task
def send_email(to, subject, body):
    # This runs in a background thread.
    time.sleep(2)  # Simulate sending.
    print(f"Sent '{subject}' to {to}")

# These all return immediately.
send_email("alice@example.com", "Hello", "How are you?")
send_email("bob@example.com", "Update", "Project shipped.")
send_email("charlie@example.com", "Reminder", "Meeting at 3.")

# Main thread keeps running while emails send in the background.
print("All emails queued.")

Under the hood, Background uses a ThreadPoolExecutor. The default thread count matches your CPU cores. You can configure it if you need to.

The Philosophy

Sometimes you need Celery. Sometimes you need Redis. And sometimes you just need a function to run without blocking the main thread. Background is for that third case.

I use it on this very website for trivial background tasks outside the main event loop. Not everything needs infrastructure. Sometimes a thread pool and a decorator are exactly enough.

The project was gifted to Parth Shandilya, who now maintains it.

Install

$ uv pip install background

Resources

• Source Code on GitHub
• Python Package Index

Related

• Delegator — Another small, focused utility for common Python tasks.
• Requests — The philosophy that simple tools should stay simple.