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kennethreitz
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New essay on physical modeling synthesis in pure Python — Karplus-Strong strings, tabla strokes, djembe cross-choking, Hammond organ drawbars. Software pages: - Responder: mention this site runs on it, link to colophon - All pages: change pip install to uv add Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
74 lines
2.8 KiB
Markdown
74 lines
2.8 KiB
Markdown
# Background: Simple Background Tasks
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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.
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$ uv add background
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## What It Looks Like
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```python
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import time
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import background
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@background.task
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def send_email(to, subject, body):
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# This runs in a background thread.
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time.sleep(2) # Simulate sending.
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print(f"Sent '{subject}' to {to}")
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# These all return immediately.
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send_email("alice@example.com", "Hello", "How are you?")
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send_email("bob@example.com", "Update", "Project shipped.")
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send_email("charlie@example.com", "Reminder", "Meeting at 3.")
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# Main thread keeps running while emails send in the background.
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print("All emails queued.")
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```
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Under the hood, Background uses a `ThreadPoolExecutor`. The default thread count matches your CPU cores. You can configure it if you need to:
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```python
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import background
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# Set the number of background threads.
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background.n = 8
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@background.task
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def process_image(path):
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# Up to 8 of these will run concurrently.
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resize_and_compress(path)
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# Returns a Future you can inspect if needed.
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future = process_image("/uploads/photo.jpg")
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future.result() # Block until complete, if you want.
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```
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The decorated function returns a `concurrent.futures.Future`, so you get the simplicity of fire-and-forget with the option to wait for results when you need them.
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## The Philosophy
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Sometimes you need Celery. Sometimes you need Redis and a message broker and dead-letter queues and retry policies. And sometimes you just need a function to run without blocking the main thread. Background is for that third case.
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Not everything needs infrastructure. Not every background task needs to survive a server restart. Sometimes a thread pool and a decorator are exactly enough. The gap between "I need this to run in the background" and "I need a distributed task queue" is enormous, and Background lives in that gap.
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I use it on this very website for trivial background tasks outside the main event loop. It's the kind of tool that would be embarrassing to over-engineer and satisfying to keep simple.
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The project was gifted to [Parth Shandilya](https://github.com/ParthS007), who now maintains it.
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## Install
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```bash
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$ uv add background
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```
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## Resources
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- [Source Code on GitHub](https://github.com/ParthS007/background)
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- [Python Package Index](https://pypi.org/project/background/)
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## Related
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- [**Delegator**](/software/delegator) — Another small, focused utility for common Python tasks.
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- [**Requests**](/software/requests) — The philosophy that simple tools should stay simple.
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- [**Programming as Spiritual Practice**](/essays/2025-08-26-programming_as_spiritual_practice) — Knowing when not to over-engineer is its own discipline.
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