Set up a scheduled job?

One solution that I have employed is to do this:

1) Create a custom management command, e.g.

python manage.py my_cool_command

2) Use cron (on Linux) or at (on Windows) to run my command at the required times.

This is a simple solution that doesn't require installing a heavy AMQP stack. However there are nice advantages to using something like Celery, mentioned in the other answers. In particular, with Celery it is nice to not have to spread your application logic out into crontab files. However the cron solution works quite nicely for a small to medium sized application and where you don't want a lot of external dependencies.

EDIT:

In later version of windows the at command is deprecated for Windows 8, Server 2012 and above. You can use schtasks.exe for same use.

**** UPDATE **** This the new link of django doc for writing the custom management command

Celery is a distributed task queue, built on AMQP (RabbitMQ). It also handles periodic tasks in a cron-like fashion (see periodic tasks). Depending on your app, it might be worth a gander.

Celery is pretty easy to set up with django (docs), and periodic tasks will actually skip missed tasks in case of a downtime. Celery also has built-in retry mechanisms, in case a task fails.

If you're using a standard POSIX OS, you use cron.

If you're using Windows, you use at.

Write a Django management command to

1. Figure out what platform they're on.

2. Either execute the appropriate "AT" command for your users, or update the crontab for your users.

Interesting new pluggable Django app: django-chronograph

You only have to add one cron entry which acts as a timer, and you have a very nice Django admin interface into the scripts to run.