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Django deploying website

I have made a website with django. I want to deploy this application to production.

Now I am confused about several things: at the time of the development I can run my application using the command: python manage.py runserver IP_OF_SERVER:PORT. Now by this approach I can do everything. My tool (website) will only be used locally. Is it fine that I deploy my website with this command only? Is is necessary to do django production processes and if it is necessary how to do that? I am new to django. Please help me to understand.

Solution

  • Usually, these kinds of things are deployed in a three tier fashion.

    Here, the general approach is like so

    [Database] <-(db calls)-> [Django app] <- wsgi -> [gunicorn] <- http -> [nginx] <- http -> public

    your application is the "Django app" block over here. You could run it with something like manage.py runserver but that's a very lightweight toy server which can't really handle high levels of traffic. If you have a request that takes 1ms to handle and 100 users try to make the same request, the last client will have to wait 100ms before she can get the response. It's easy to solve this by just running more instances of your application but the dev server can't do that.

    A so called "app server" like gunicorn will allow you to run a more powerful web server for your application that can spawn off multiple workers and handle some kinds of mischievous traffic patterns.

    Now, even gunicorn can be bested by a high performance server especially for serving static assets like images, css, js etc. This is something like nginx. So, we set up our thing to have nginx facing the world and serving all static assets directly. And request to the actual application will be proxied to gunicorn and that will be served by your actual app.

    This is not as complex as it sounds and you should be able to get something running within a day or so. All the technologies I've mentioned have substitutes with different characteristics. This is a good tutorial on how to get things going and what to look out for during deployment.