How do I run a loop in Django while server is working as usual?

Question

I am trying to create a csgo trading website where the users can withdraw and deposit skins. To do so I have created a bot account that sends trading offers to the customer. Now I need to somehow confirm that the trade was accepted by the user. I am new to this so there might be a better, simple solution that I just can't figure out. I am using steampy library.

What I think would be the solution is to run a function loop that checks for the offers and their state. And on state change would update the database. But I do not know how I can create a function like this in Django so the server would also be running at the same time. I want to also use this project in production so running a script from my computer isn't the solution.

Can someone please help me with the issue or lead me in the right direction?

Answer 1

Based on SimbaOG's answer, I did the following steps which worked fine for me:

initialize scheduler

created alerts_check.py

from apscheduler.schedulers.background import BackgroundScheduler

# added schedule, ensure its only done once
def alerts_schedule():
    scheduler = BackgroundScheduler()
    if not scheduler.get_job('alert_check_job'):
        scheduler.add_job(alerts_check, 'interval', seconds=30, id='alert_check_job')
        scheduler.start()


    def alerts_check():
        # somewhere init log with logging.getLogger(__name__)
        log.info("****** checking for alerts...")

Invoke the alerts_check function from django startup

In apps.py

from django.apps import AppConfig as DjangoAppConfig

import logging
import sys, os


log = logging.getLogger(__name__)

class AppConfig(DjangoAppConfig):
    name = "app"
    def ready(self):
        # use an environment variable to run once only
        # check for 'runserver' so migrate etc is avoided

        once_key = 'CMD_RUN_ONCE'
        run_once = os.environ.get(once_key) 

        if run_once is not None or 'runserver' not in sys.argv:
            return True

        os.environ[once_key] = 'True' 

        # import is done only here after models are loaded            
        from app.alerts_check import alerts_schedule

        alerts_schedule()
        log.info(f"Service has started...............")