I have an application that needs to initialize Celery and other things (e.g. database). I would like to have a .ini file that would contain the applications configuration. This should be passed to the application at runtime.

development.init:

[celery]
broker=amqp://localhost/
backend=amqp://localhost/
task.result.expires=3600[database]
# database config
# ...

celeryconfig.py:

from celery import Celery
import ConfigParserconfig = ConfigParser.RawConfigParser()
config.read(...) # Pass this from the command line somehowcelery = Celery('myproject.celery',broker=config.get('celery', 'broker'),backend=config.get('celery', 'backend'),include=['myproject.tasks'])# Optional configuration, see the application user guide.
celery.conf.update(CELERY_TASK_RESULT_EXPIRES=config.getint('celery', 'task.result.expires')
)# Initialize database, etc.if __name__ == '__main__':celery.start()

To start Celery, I call:

celery worker --app=myproject.celeryconfig -l info

Is there anyway to pass in the config file without doing something ugly like setting a environment variable?

Alright, I took Jordan's advice and used a env variable. This is what I get in celeryconfig.py:

celery import Celery
import os
import sys
import ConfigParserCELERY_CONFIG = 'CELERY_CONFIG'if not CELERY_CONFIG in os.environ:sys.stderr.write('Missing env variable "%s"\n\n' % CELERY_CONFIG)sys.exit(2)configfile = os.environ['CELERY_CONFIG']if not os.path.isfile(configfile):sys.stderr.write('Can\'t read file: "%s"\n\n' % configfile)sys.exit(2)config = ConfigParser.RawConfigParser()
config.read(configfile)celery = Celery('myproject.celery',broker=config.get('celery', 'broker'),backend=config.get('celery', 'backend'),include=['myproject.tasks'])# Optional configuration, see the application user guide.
celery.conf.update(CELERY_TASK_RESULT_EXPIRES=config.getint('celery', 'task.result.expires'),
)if __name__ == '__main__':celery.start()

To start Celery:

$ export CELERY_CONFIG=development.ini
$ celery worker --app=myproject.celeryconfig -l info