Scheduling tasks for the future

Let's say we want to run a task X seconds in the future. The way to do that is defined in the reactor interface twisted.internet.interfaces.IReactorTime:

from twisted.internet import reactor

def f(s):
    print "this will run 3.5 seconds after it was scheduled: %s" % s

reactor.callLater(3.5, f, "hello, world")

# f() will only be called if the event loop is started.
reactor.run()

If the result of the function is important or if it may be necessary to handle exceptions it raises, then the twisted.internet.task.deferLater utility conveniently takes care of creating a Deferred and setting up a delayed call:

from twisted.internet import task
from twisted.internet import reactor

def f(s):
    return "This will run 3.5 seconds after it was scheduled: %s" % s

d = task.deferLater(reactor, 3.5, f, "hello, world")
def called(result):
    print result
d.addCallback(called)

# f() will only be called if the event loop is started.
reactor.run()

If we want a task to run every X seconds repeatedly, we can use twisted.internet.task.LoopingCall:

from twisted.internet import task
from twisted.internet import reactor

def runEverySecond():
    print "a second has passed"

l = task.LoopingCall(runEverySecond)
l.start(1.0) # call every second

# l.stop() will stop the looping calls
reactor.run()

If we want to cancel a task that we've scheduled:

from twisted.internet import reactor

def f():
    print "I'll never run."

callID = reactor.callLater(5, f)
callID.cancel()
reactor.run()

As with all reactor-based code, in order for scheduling to work the reactor must be started using reactor.run().