Question

I have recently switched to Django for a web app I’m developing and I followed the instructions at Heroku for getting a Django app running on Heroku. I have a virtual environment in which my app is developed and I use git for version control and to push to Heroku. The link above suggests that I intall gunicorn:

The examples above used the default HTTP server for Django. For
production apps, you may wish to use a more production-ready embedded
webserver, such as Tornado, gevent’s WSGI server, or Gunicorn.

They then walk the user through installing Gunicorn.

My question is: what problems might I run into if I skip this step and just stay with the default? What benefits will Gunicorn give me?

Answer 1

Gunicorn is production ready and really easy to use. I use it for my websites. You usually should run it via a reverse proxy like Nginx. I’m not sure what Heroku is using. You really should try it.

In my experience it’s much easier to use and configure than apache & mod_wsgi, and the other similar setups.

edit/update:
As a summary of the comments below, Heroku already uses Nginx as a reverse proxy