How to deploy with WSGI

Django’s primary deployment platform is WSGI, the Python standard for web servers and applications.

Django’s startproject management command sets up a simple default WSGI configuration for you, which you can tweak as needed for your project, and direct any WSGI-compliant webserver to use. Django includes getting-started documentation for the following WSGI servers:

The application object

One key concept of deploying with WSGI is to specify a central application callable object which the webserver uses to communicate with your code. This is commonly specified as an object named application in a Python module accessible to the server.

The startproject command creates a projectname/wsgi.py that contains such an application callable.

Note

Upgrading from a previous release of Django and don’t have a wsgi.py file in your project? You can simply add one to your project’s top-level Python package (probably next to settings.py and urls.py) with the contents below. If you want runserver to also make use of this WSGI file, you can also add WSGI_APPLICATION = "mysite.wsgi.application" in your settings (replacing mysite with the name of your project).

Initially this file contains:

import os

os.environ.setdefault("DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE", "mysite.settings")

# This application object is used by the development server
# as well as any WSGI server configured to use this file.
from django.core.wsgi import get_wsgi_application
application = get_wsgi_application()

The os.environ.setdefault line just sets the default settings module to use, if you haven’t explicitly set the DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE environment variable. You’ll need to edit this line to replace mysite with the name of your project package, so the path to your settings module is correct.

To apply WSGI middleware you can simply wrap the application object in the same file:

from helloworld.wsgi import HelloWorldApplication
application = HelloWorldApplication(application)

You could also replace the Django WSGI application with a custom WSGI application that later delegates to the Django WSGI application, if you want to combine a Django application with a WSGI application of another framework.