Developing with Django+Celery without running `celeryd`?

Yes you can do this by setting CELERY_TASK_ALWAYS_EAGER = True in your settings.
(Constant was previously called CELERY_ALWAYS_EAGER) http://docs.celeryproject.org/en/latest/userguide/configuration.html#task-execution-settings

There's also a custom Django test runner in django-celery that helps with CELERY_ALWAYS_EAGER. Read more about using Celery with Django on the docs.

In version 4.0 of Celery CELERY_ALWAYS_EAGER setting was replaced by CELERY_TASK_ALWAYS_EAGER in Django settings.py or task_always_eager natively in celery conf.

Since the numerous changes in the celery configuration from version 3.x to 4.x are spread over many lines, I suggest to use the built-in settings migration tool.

celery upgrade settings --django

source:

Luckily you don’t have to manually change the files, as the celery upgrade settings --django program should do the right thing.

http://docs.celeryproject.org/en/latest/whatsnew-4.0.html#step-4-upgrade-to-celery-4-0