title: How to check task status in Celery?
body: <p>How does one check whether a task is running in celery (specifically, I'm using celery-django)?</p>
  
  <p>I've read the documentation, and I've googled, but I can't see a call like:</p>
  
  <pre><code>my_example_task.state() == RUNNING
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>My use-case is that I have an external (java) service for transcoding. When I send a document to be transcoded, I want to check if the task that runs that service is running, and if not, to (re)start it.</p>
  
  <p>I'm using the current stable versions - 2.4, I believe.</p>