Entries published on November 5, 2007
“Server startup” and its discontents
A fairly common question people ask on the Django mailing lists and in the IRC channel is “how do I have something run when the server starts up?” This is a somewhat tricky question to answer, because in many ways there’s no concept of “server start” in Django, and because the reasons behind the question vary from one use case to the next. So let’s take a look at just what people are wanting to do at “server start”, what that means (and, just as importantly, what it doesn’t mean) and how to handle it in a Django-based application.