Why isn't Django serving staticfiles in production?

Question

I am wondering the reason why Django does not serve the statifiles in production, when DEGUB = False.

STATICFILES_DIRS
We specify STATICFILES_DIRS to tell Django where to look for staticfiles that are tied up to a specified app.

STATIC_ROOT
We specify STATIC_ROOT to tell Django where to store the files once we run python manage.py collectstatic, so everystatic file is stored in the path specified in STATIC_ROOT.
Assume that we set STATIC_ROOT = "staticfiles/".
This means that once we run the collectstatic command, all the files that are inside STATICFILES_DIRS paths are going to be stored in "staticfiles/"

STATIC_URL Finally we specify STATIC_URL as "prefix" to tell Djando where to look for staticfiles, for example in the HTML <link> tag, the url that we see is based on STATIC_URL value

When we upload our project to the server, we upload the entire project, so every single file. Why can't Django serve staticfiles itself when running on server?
As I just said, we upload the entire folder, so the files we uploaded are there (and the staticfiles too!).

QUESTIONS

• I am just wondering, why do we have to specify the staticfiles based on server in production, when Django could do everything for us as it have always done in localhost?
• Isn't load the files from another storage so much slower than load them from main folder of the project?

Answer 1

I am just wondering, why do we have to specify the staticfiles based on server in production, when Django could do everything for us as it have always done in localhost?

Because it is likely inefficient and insecure. Each time a request is made, the request passes through all middleware then the view will produce a response that will again pass through the middleware to the client. If you request the same file a second time, it will likely not have any caching, and thus repeat that process again. If you work with a webserver like Nginx/Apache, it will probably cache the result. If you work with a CDN, then it will also contact the nearest server and thus get access to these resources in a more efficient way.

Another problem is security. If you specify a path to a file that is not supposed to be served, then the webserver should prevent the browser from accessing that file. Some hackers for example try to access the source files of the browser to then look for vulnerabilities. This should not be possible. Likely a web server like Apache or Nginx will have more advanced security mechanisms for this in place.

If you really want to, you can use WhiteNoise to let Django serve static files and media files in production. This Django application has been optimized for security and efficiency. Although it is hard to tell if it will have the same level as aan Apache or Nginx server.

Isn't load the files from another storage so much slower than load them from main folder of the project?

The webserver will not contact the other storage: the browser will do that. It thus is possible that instead of the webserver, it will contact a CDN. It is possible that this is slightly less efficient, since a webbrowser usually reuses the open connection to the server to make more requests, but often you already contacted that CDN, for example for JavaScript files. Furthermore CDNs are optimized to deliver content as efficient as possible: the browser will usually contact a browerser close to the client, and usually there is also load balancing and redundancy in place to make it less likely that the server can no longer serve the resource.