Picking up from Django app template w/ Docker, here are the steps to add Celery to the Django app.

Add RabbitMQ as the message queue

Modify docker-compose.yml to include:

services:
  ...
  rabbitmq:
    image: rabbitmq:3-management
    ports:
      - "15672:15672"
    expose:
      - "15672"

I use the “3-management” tag so that it includes a management plugin (accessible at http://localhost:15672/). However, simpler tags (e.g. “3” or “latest“) can be used if the management UI is not needed.

Install celery to the Django project

docker-compose run --rm app /bin/bash
...
pip install celery
pip freeze -r requirements.txt > requirements.txt
exit

Rebuild the container with the new packages added by celery.

Add a couple of files to set up Celery in our Django project

The Celery stuff will be added into the myapp Django app.

myapp/celery.py

from celery import Celery


app = Celery(
    'celery_app',
    broker='amqp://rabbitmq',
    # backend='rpc://',

    # This should include modules/files that define tasks. This is a list of strs 
    # to be evaluated later in order to get around circular dependencies, I suspect.
    include=[  
        'myapp.tasks',  # This is our file containing our task
    ]
)

# Optional configuration, see the application user guide.
app.conf.update(result_expires=3600)


if __name__ == '__main__':
    app.start()

myapp/tasks.py

import logging

from myapp.celery import app


logger = logging.getLogger(__name__)


# This is where Celery tasks are defined


@app.task
def add(x: int, y: int) -> int:
    logger.info(f"add({x}, {y}) called.")
    return x + y

Add a Celery service to docker-compose.yml

Modify docker-compose.yml again to add a Celery service. This can be done together with the RabbitMQ service above, but it is shown here separately for readability.

services:
  ...
  rabbitmq:
    ...
  app-celery:
    build: .
    environment:
    - DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=myapp.settings
    command: >
      sh -c "celery -A myapp.celery worker --loglevel=INFO"
    volumes:
      - ./:/code
    depends_on:
      rabbitmq:
        condition: service_started

Things to watch out for

A bunch of things to highlight to show where the connection points are:

• The broker URL when instantiating the Celery app is amqp://rabbitmq (not amqp://localhost) because that’s how networking in Docker works. The “rabbitmq” in this case the name of the service we use for the RabbitMQ container. So if a different container name is used, this AMQP URL needs to use that corresponding name.
• The Celery app parameter (-A myapp.celery) is the path to the myapp/celery.py file where the Celery app (app = Celery('celery_app', ...) ) is created.
• Speaking of which, when defining the Celery app, its include=[ ... ] should include str values that point to files where Celery tasks are defined.
• And the task files that define the Celery tasks need to import the Celery app and use its @app.task decorator for the task functions.

Complete docker-compose.yml

The entire file looks like:

services:
  app:
    build: .
    command: >
      sh -c "python manage.py migrate &&
        python manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000"
    ports:
      - "8000:8000"
    expose:
      - "8000"
    volumes:
      - ./:/code
    depends_on:
      rabbitmq:
        condition: service_started
    tty: true
    stdin_open: true
  app-celery:
    build: .
    command: >
      sh -c "celery -A myapp.celery worker --loglevel=INFO"
    volumes:
      - ./:/code
    depends_on:
      rabbitmq:
        condition: service_started
  rabbitmq:
    image: rabbitmq:3-management
    ports:
      - "15672:15672"
    expose:
      - "15672"