Install the Google Cloud Client Library for Python
- Before using the Cloud Tasks API in Python, you'll need to install the Google Cloud Python client library. You can do this using pip:
pip install google-cloud-tasks
Create a Google Cloud Task
- To create a task, you'll need to first set up the proper imports and authenticate your client. Make sure to replace placeholders like `project`, `location`, `queue`, and `url` with your specific data.
from google.cloud import tasks_v2
from google.protobuf import timestamp_pb2
import datetime
def create_task(project, queue, location, url, payload=None, in_seconds=None):
client = tasks_v2.CloudTasksClient()
parent = client.queue_path(project, location, queue)
task = {
'http_request': {
'http_method': tasks_v2.HttpMethod.POST,
'url': url
}
}
if payload:
task['http_request']['body'] = payload.encode()
if in_seconds:
d = datetime.datetime.utcnow() + datetime.timedelta(seconds=in_seconds)
timestamp = timestamp_pb2.Timestamp()
timestamp.FromDatetime(d)
task['schedule_time'] = timestamp
response = client.create_task(parent=parent, task=task)
print('Created task {}'.format(response.name))
Queue Configuration
- Ensure your Cloud Tasks queue is configured correctly within Google Cloud Platform. Check settings such as rate limits, retry configurations, and possible routing configurations that might be specific to your tasks.
Authentication
- Make sure that your environment is set up for Google Cloud Authentication. Typically, you'll want to use a service account with permissions to access Cloud Tasks. Authenticate locally by setting the `GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS` in your environment:
export GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS="/path/to/your/service-account-file.json"
Handling Task Execution
- Your HTTP endpoint needs to handle incoming requests securely. Consider verifying the incoming requests with authentication or other verification methods to ensure they originate from Cloud Tasks.
- Test the task execution to ensure that when a task is dispatched to your endpoint, it behaves as expected and check that it gracefully handles retries and potential errors.
Example of Setting Up a Flask Endpoint to Handle Task Requests
- Here is a simple Flask application that can handle incoming Google Cloud Tasks requests:
from flask import Flask, request
app = Flask(__name__)
@app.route('/example-task-handler', methods=['POST'])
def example_task_handler():
payload = request.data.decode('utf-8')
print(f"Task received with payload: {payload}")
return '', 200
if __name__ == "__main__":
app.run(host='0.0.0.0', port=8080)
Secure Your Task Handler
- Ensure that the endpoint is not publicly accessible unless behind a secure firewall. Use Identity-Aware Proxy (IAP) or other security measures to authenticate requests.
- Consider utilizing JSON Web Tokens (JWT) to validate incoming requests are from Cloud Tasks.
