Deployment checklist

The Internet is a hostile environment. Before deploying your Django project,you should take some time to review your settings, with security, performance,and operations in mind.

Django includes many security features. Some arebuilt-in and always enabled. Others are optional because they aren't alwaysappropriate, or because they're inconvenient for development. For example,forcing HTTPS may not be suitable for all websites, and it's impractical forlocal development.

Performance optimizations are another category of trade-offs with convenience.For instance, caching is useful in production, less so for local development.Error reporting needs are also widely different.

The following checklist includes settings that:

  • must be set properly for Django to provide the expected level of security;
  • are expected to be different in each environment;
  • enable optional security features;
  • enable performance optimizations;
  • provide error reporting.Many of these settings are sensitive and should be treated as confidential. Ifyou're releasing the source code for your project, a common practice is topublish suitable settings for development, and to use a private settingsmodule for production.

Run manage.py check —deploy

Some of the checks described below can be automated using the check—deploy option. Be sure to run it against your production settings file asdescribed in the option's documentation.

Critical settings

SECRET_KEY

The secret key must be a large random value and it must be kept secret.

Make sure that the key used in production isn't used anywhere else and avoidcommitting it to source control. This reduces the number of vectors from whichan attacker may acquire the key.

Instead of hardcoding the secret key in your settings module, consider loadingit from an environment variable:

  1. import os
  2. SECRET_KEY = os.environ['SECRET_KEY']

or from a file:

  1. with open('/etc/secret_key.txt') as f:
  2.     SECRET_KEY = f.read().strip()

DEBUG

You must never enable debug in production.

You're certainly developing your project with DEBUG = True,since this enables handy features like full tracebacks in your browser.

For a production environment, though, this is a really bad idea, because itleaks lots of information about your project: excerpts of your source code,local variables, settings, libraries used, etc.

Environment-specific settings

ALLOWED_HOSTS

When DEBUG = False, Django doesn't work at all without asuitable value for ALLOWED_HOSTS.

This setting is required to protect your site against some CSRF attacks. Ifyou use a wildcard, you must perform your own validation of the Host HTTPheader, or otherwise ensure that you aren't vulnerable to this category ofattacks.

You should also configure the Web server that sits in front of Django tovalidate the host. It should respond with a static error page or ignorerequests for incorrect hosts instead of forwarding the request to Django. Thisway you'll avoid spurious errors in your Django logs (or emails if you haveerror reporting configured that way). For example, on nginx you might setup adefault server to return "444 No Response" on an unrecognized host:

  1. server {
  2.     listen 80 default_server;
  3.     return 444;
  4. }

CACHES

If you're using a cache, connection parameters may be different in developmentand in production. Django defaults to per-process local-memory caching which may not be desirable.

Cache servers often have weak authentication. Make sure they only acceptconnections from your application servers.

If you're using Memcached, consider using cached sessions to improve performance.

DATABASES

Database connection parameters are probably different in development and inproduction.

Database passwords are very sensitive. You should protect them exactly likeSECRET_KEY.

For maximum security, make sure database servers only accept connections fromyour application servers.

If you haven't set up backups for your database, do it right now!

If your site sends emails, these values need to be set correctly.

By default, Django sends email from webmaster@localhost and root@localhost.However, some mail providers reject email from these addresses. To usedifferent sender addresses, modify the DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL andSERVER_EMAIL settings.

STATIC_ROOT and STATIC_URL

Static files are automatically served by the development server. Inproduction, you must define a STATIC_ROOT directory wherecollectstatic will copy them.

See Managing static files (e.g. images, JavaScript, CSS) for more information.

MEDIA_ROOT and MEDIA_URL

Media files are uploaded by your users. They're untrusted! Make sure your webserver never attempts to interpret them. For instance, if a user uploads a.php file, the web server shouldn't execute it.

Now is a good time to check your backup strategy for these files.

HTTPS

Any website which allows users to log in should enforce site-wide HTTPS toavoid transmitting access tokens in clear. In Django, access tokens includethe login/password, the session cookie, and password reset tokens. (You can'tdo much to protect password reset tokens if you're sending them by email.)

Protecting sensitive areas such as the user account or the admin isn'tsufficient, because the same session cookie is used for HTTP and HTTPS. Yourweb server must redirect all HTTP traffic to HTTPS, and only transmit HTTPSrequests to Django.

Once you've set up HTTPS, enable the following settings.

Set this to True to avoid transmitting the CSRF cookie over HTTPaccidentally.

Set this to True to avoid transmitting the session cookie over HTTPaccidentally.

Performance optimizations

Setting DEBUG = False disables several features that areonly useful in development. In addition, you can tune the following settings.

CONN_MAX_AGE

Enabling persistent database connections can result in a nice speed-up whenconnecting to the database accounts for a significant part of the requestprocessing time.

This helps a lot on virtualized hosts with limited network performance.

TEMPLATES

Enabling the cached template loader often improves performance drastically, asit avoids compiling each template every time it needs to be rendered. See thetemplate loaders docs for more information.

Error reporting

By the time you push your code to production, it's hopefully robust, but youcan't rule out unexpected errors. Thankfully, Django can capture errors andnotify you accordingly.

LOGGING

Review your logging configuration before putting your website in production,and check that it works as expected as soon as you have received some traffic.

See 日志 for details on logging.

ADMINS and MANAGERS

ADMINS will be notified of 500 errors by email.

MANAGERS will be notified of 404 errors.IGNORABLE_404_URLS can help filter out spurious reports.

See Error reporting for details on error reporting by email.

Error reporting by email doesn't scale very well

Consider using an error monitoring system such as Sentry before yourinbox is flooded by reports. Sentry can also aggregate logs.

Customize the default error views

Django includes default views and templates for several HTTP error codes. Youmay want to override the default templates by creating the following templatesin your root template directory: 404.html, 500.html, 403.html, and400.html. The default views should suffice for 99% of Web applications, butif you desire to customize them, see these instructions which also containdetails about the default templates: