Book Image

Web Development with Django - Second Edition

By : Ben Shaw, Saurabh Badhwar, Chris Guest, Bharath Chandra K S
4.7 (3)
Book Image

Web Development with Django - Second Edition

4.7 (3)
By: Ben Shaw, Saurabh Badhwar, Chris Guest, Bharath Chandra K S

Overview of this book

Do you want to develop reliable and secure applications that stand out from the crowd without spending hours on boilerplate code? You’ve made the right choice trusting the Django framework, and this book will tell you why. Often referred to as a “batteries included” web development framework, Django comes with all the core features needed to build a standalone application. Web Development with Django will take you through all the essential concepts and help you explore its power to build real-world applications using Python. Throughout the book, you’ll get the grips with the major features of Django by building a website called Bookr – a repository for book reviews. This end-to-end case study is split into a series of bitesize projects presented as exercises and activities, allowing you to challenge yourself in an enjoyable and attainable way. As you advance, you'll acquire various practical skills, including how to serve static files to add CSS, JavaScript, and images to your application, how to implement forms to accept user input, and how to manage sessions to ensure a reliable user experience. You’ll cover everyday tasks that are part of the development cycle of a real-world web application. By the end of this Django book, you'll have the skills and confidence to creatively develop and deploy your own projects.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)

Static file serving

In the introduction, we mentioned that Django includes a view function called static that serves static files. The first important point to make regarding serving static files is that Django does not intend to serve them in production. It is not Django’s role, and in production, Django will refuse to serve static files. This is normal and intended behavior. If Django is just reading from the filesystem and sending out a file, then it has no advantage over a normal web server, which will probably be more performant at this task. Further, if you serve static files with Django, you will keep the Python process busy for the duration of this request and it will be unable to serve the dynamic requests for which it is more suited.

For these reasons, the Django static view is designed only for use during development and will not work if your DEBUG setting is False. Since during development we usually only have one person accessing the site at a time (the developer...