Question

I understand that it’s simple and doesn’t require any installation whatsoever, but are there any other reasons to use it for long-term development instead of Apache with mod_wsgi? As a Django newbie, I just find deployment from development to live (Apache) environment quite cumbersome and annoying, so the question that comes into my mind is: Isn’t it simpler to just use mod_wsgi on localhost too? Only mention about this in Django manual I found was:

We’ve included this with Django so you
can develop things rapidly, without
having to deal with configuring a
production server — such as Apache —
until you’re ready for production.

Answer 1

You sometimes need the production setup locally when you’re developing. I’ve needed it when I was messing with some subdomain related code that tied into the application and needed to mimic my real server locally.

However, for most things, the dev server is a big win. Here are a few points.

1. Like rebus mentioned, the auto restart.
2. Tracebacks on the console and useful debugging information.
3. You can stick pdb.set_trace() into parts of your code and get a debugger prompt while a view method is executing if you want to look at stuff.
4. The entire stack runs as a single user (you) which you have complete control over.
5. One command to start and run.

These come with a price which is reduced performance and inability to handle real life traffic. That’s why you need a real web server to run it in production.