Static Files and Gunicorn Deployment

Now that we've covered environment-based configuration in Environment-Based Settings and Secrets, our Django CRUD app has the right production-shaped settings foundation.

The next step is making the app runnable like a real web service.

Two things usually surprise new Django developers during deployment:

• CSS, images, and JavaScript do not behave the same way as they do with runserver.
• python manage.py runserver is not the server you use for real traffic.

In this lesson, we'll prepare the app for a production-like launch using:

• Django static file settings
• collectstatic
• WhiteNoise for simple static file serving
• Gunicorn as the Python web server

The goal is not a full cloud deployment yet. The goal is to make the project ready to be deployed safely when a hosting platform enters the picture.