How to make Django serve static files with Gunicorn?

Question

I want to run my django project under gunicorn on localhost. I installed and integrated gunicorn. When I run:

python manage.py run_gunicorn

Answer 1

Whitenoise

Post v4.0

http://whitenoise.evans.io/en/stable/changelog.html#v4-0

The WSGI integration option for Django (which involved editing wsgi.py) has been removed. Instead, you should add WhiteNoise to your middleware list in settings.py and remove any reference to WhiteNoise from wsgi.py. See the documentation for more details. (The pure WSGI integration is still available for non-Django apps.)

Pre v4.0

Heroku recommends this method at: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/django-assets:

Your application will now serve static assets directly from Gunicorn in production. This will be perfectly adequate for most applications, but top-tier applications may want to explore using a CDN with Django-Storages.

Install with:

pip install whitenoise
pip freeze > requirements.txt

wsgi.py:

import os
from django.core.wsgi import get_wsgi_application
from whitenoise.django import DjangoWhiteNoise

os.environ.setdefault("DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE", "free_books.settings")
application = get_wsgi_application()
application = DjangoWhiteNoise(application)

Tested on Django 1.9.