Book Image

Web Development with Django

By : Ben Shaw, Saurabh Badhwar, Andrew Bird, Bharath Chandra K S, Chris Guest
Book Image

Web Development with Django

By: Ben Shaw, Saurabh Badhwar, Andrew Bird, Bharath Chandra K S, Chris Guest

Overview of this book

Do you want to develop reliable and secure applications which stand out from the crowd, rather than spending hours on boilerplate code? Then the Django framework is where you should begin. 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 takes this philosophy and equips you with the knowledge and confidence to build real-world applications using Python. Starting with the essential concepts of Django, you'll cover its major features 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 that are presented as exercises and activities, allowing you to challenge yourself in an enjoyable and attainable way. As you progress, you'll learn 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. Throughout this book, you'll cover key daily tasks that are part of the development cycle of a real-world web application. By the end of this book, you'll have the skills and confidence to creatively tackle your own ambitious projects with Django.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Preface

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 the serving of static files is that Django is not intended 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 would probably be more performant at this task. Furthermore, if you serve static files with Django, you will keep the Python process busy for the duration of the request and it will be unable to serve the dynamic requests to 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 only usually have one person accessing the site at a time (the...