How to inspect and cancel Celery tasks by task name

There is one issue that earlier answers have not addressed and may throw off people if they are not aware of it.

Among those solutions already posted, I'd use Danielle's with one minor modification: I'd import the task into my file and use its .name attribute to get the task name to pass to .tasks_by_type().

app.control.revoke(
    [uuid for uuid, _ in
     celery.events.state.State().tasks_by_type(task.name)])

However, this solution will ignore those tasks that have been scheduled for future execution. Like some people who commented on other answers, when I checked what .tasks_by_type() return I had an empty list. And indeed my queues were empty. But I knew that there were tasks scheduled to be executed in the future and these were my primary target. I could see them by executing celery -A [app] inspect scheduled but they were unaffected by the code above.

I managed to revoke the scheduled tasks by doing this:

app.control.revoke(
    [scheduled["request"]["id"] for scheduled in
     chain.from_iterable(app.control.inspect().scheduled()
                         .itervalues())])

app.control.inspect().scheduled() returns a dictionary whose keys are worker names and values are lists of scheduling information (hence, the need for chain.from_iterable which is imported from itertools). The task information is in the "request" field of the scheduling information and "id" contains the task id. Note that even after revocation, the scheduled task will still show among the scheduled tasks. Scheduled tasks that are revoked won't get removed from the list of scheduled tasks until their timers expire or until Celery performs some cleanup operation. (Restarting workers triggers such cleanup.)

# Retrieve tasks
# Reference: http://docs.celeryproject.org/en/latest/reference/celery.events.state.html
query = celery.events.state.tasks_by_type(your_task_name)

# Kill tasks
# Reference: http://docs.celeryproject.org/en/latest/userguide/workers.html#revoking-tasks
for uuid, task in query:
    celery.control.revoke(uuid, terminate=True)