The right way to serve static files when using django with gunicorn

Yesterday, I learned during deployment that your Django app when used in combination with gunicorn will refuse to serve static files, do whatever you may. I looked up almost every Stack Overflow answer post on this topic including this, this and this.

I meddled with almost every hopeful setting including STATICFILES_DIRS[], STATIC_ROOT and STATIC_URL but to no avail. Its as if Django is designed to refuse serving of static files when using gunicorn and that’s what I started to suspect after everything failed.

And my suspicion was almost confirmed by this post which says that:

Gunicorn will only serve the dynamic content, i.e. the Django files

But I know that’s not strictly true because I’ve used Gunicorn with Flask in the past and it serves static files of your Flask app without any issues at all!

But then I thought that its better to handle static files using nginx anyway and since I was already using nginx as the front proxy on my server anyway, I thought of trying that post’s suggestion. As mentioned, I added a new location section to my nginx configuration file as follows:

location /static {
		autoindex on;
		alias /path/to/staticfiles;
	}

And that’s exactly what worked! I bypassed gunicorn entirely and static files are now being served directly by the front server and I think this is a more efficient setup than having gunicorn serve the static files.

But why gunicorn/django refuse to serve static files directly still remain a mystery. I think the problem lies somewhere in Django and not gunicorn because as I said, I’ve seen gunicorn serve Flask static files before.