Ops Story: Serve static files in production

[nlMeminger]

Summary

Django does not serve static files when DEBUG is set to False, or rather when the application is set to be used in production mode.

Background

During our attempt to move the app to production it was discovered that we need to figure out how to serve static files while in production. Something that is already done in Development.

Details

We need to research how to either use another service like Nginx or apache to serve our content or research on how to remove our static content using something like Django-compressor.

Outcome

In the end, we should be able to use our app with DEBUG set to False so that we can move to production.

[nlMeminger]

here is what I've got so far. In the Django documentation, using the ./manage.py runserver command in production is not recommended. That is only meant for development. Instead, it is suggested to use another web application like Nginx since Django is not a web application like we expected.

So here is what I've found from these two sources, which are related (linked below). We need to amend our documentation to include Nginx installation and configuration, and use it to serve our static content. This is pretty simple, just install nginx, make a server block for our app, and start the service. These steps are better documented in the sites I've linked.

As I understand so far, using Docker like we have been is still possible. What we need to change to make it work is add gunicorn as a dependency and make our entrypoint command for the container the gunicorn command instead. This may be a wrong assumption.

All the work I've done has been commited to the branch named production.

Links as promised, in the order they should be read.
https://medium.com/@_christopher/deploying-my-django-app-to-a-real-server-part-i-de78962e95ac
https://medium.com/@_christopher/deploying-my-django-app-to-a-real-server-part-ii-f0c277c338f4

[jwflory]

This has stretched out for a long time, but I figured out the best way for us to approach this:

1. Change the entrypoints on containers to use Gunicorn
2. Point Monroe County I.T. at extensive documentation for running Django application in production with a web server in front

The changes required for no. 1 are in change/gunicorn. No. 2 saves us from a lot of work that we won't be able to address in time, but we can point out to the Gunicorn documentation for help here. It's pretty thorough.

I need @nlMeminger to build it on the staging server one last time to make sure it starts up in a production environment. Once he does and if it checks out, we'll officially close this out.