What's up Python? Django get background tasks, a new REPL, bye bye gunicorn

Background tasks! I am effervescently happy to read this news.

You should check out Huey next time. It is a lifesaver for us. Allows us to do the tasks via SQLite db

My real pain point as a user with Django is deployment. Python is so much easier to write, but javascript is so much easier to deploy.

I wish they could make it easy to deploy django or other python framework in a serverless function with decent security baked in.

What I love about Django is that you can create a Django project with just one file.

You can turn a fresh Debian machine into a running Django web app by just doing:

    apt install -y python3-django apache2 libapache2-mod-wsgi-py3

And then creating the one file Django needs:

/var/www/mysite/mysite/wsgi.py:

    import os
    import django
    from django.core.wsgi import get_wsgi_application
    os.environ.setdefault('DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE', 'mysite.wsgi')
    application = get_wsgi_application()

    ROOT_URLCONF = 'mysite.wsgi'
    SECRET_KEY = 'hello'

    def index(request):
        return django.http.HttpResponse('This is the homepage')

    def cats(request):
        return django.http.HttpResponse('This is the cats page')

    urlpatterns = [
        django.urls.path('', index),
        django.urls.path('cats', cats),
    ]

And then telling Apache where to look for it:

/etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default.conf:

    ServerName 127.0.0.1
    WSGIPythonPath /var/www/mysite
    
        WSGIScriptAlias / /var/www/mysite/mysite/wsgi.py
        
            
                Require all granted
            
        
    

And voilá, you have a running Django application, which you can expand upon to any size and complexity.

If you want to try it in a docker container, you can run

    docker run -it --rm -p80:80 debian:12

perform the steps above and then access the Django application at 127.0.0.1

Oh man, I wish this was a bit more mature. I am writing a distributed image processing app right now with Celery, Flask, and SQLAlchemy, but I am finding it difficult to KISS. I was tempted to use Django but couldn't justify the overhead. If they get this cleaned up in the next year that would be awesome!