Production-grade static file server for Python WSGI & ASGI.
This project is a fork of WhiteNoise for ASGI support, bug fixes, new features, and performance upgrades.
ServeStatic simplifies static file serving for web apps with minimal lines of configuration. It transforms your app into a self-contained unit, without relying on external services like nginx or Amazon S3. This can simplify any production deployment, but is especially useful for platforms like Heroku, OpenShift, and other PaaS providers.
It is designed to work seamlessly with CDNs to ensure high performance for traffic-intensive sites, and is compatible with any ASGI/WSGI app. Extra features and auto-configuration are available for Django users.
Best practices are automatically handled by ServeStatic, such as:
- Automatically serving compressed content
- Proper handling of
Accept-EncodingandVaryheaders - Setting far-future cache headers for immutable static files.
To get started or learn more about ServeStatic, visit the documentation.
The short answer to this is that if you care about performance and efficiency then you should be using ServeStatic behind a CDN like CloudFront. If you're doing that then, because of the caching headers ServeStatic sends, the vast majority of static requests will be served directly by the CDN without touching your application, so it really doesn't make much difference how efficient ServeStatic is.
That said, ServeStatic is pretty efficient. Because it only has to serve a fixed set of files it does all the work of finding files and determining the correct headers upfront on initialization. Requests can then be served with little more than a dictionary lookup to find the appropriate response. Also, when used with gunicorn (and most other WSGI servers) the actual business of pushing the file down the network interface is handled by the kernel's very efficient sendfile syscall, not by Python.
No, you shouldn't. The main problem with this approach is that Amazon S3 cannot currently selectively serve compressed content to your users. Compression (using either the venerable gzip or the more modern brotli algorithms) can make dramatic reductions in the bandwidth required for your CSS and JavaScript. But in order to do this correctly the server needs to examine the Accept-Encoding header of the request to determine which compression formats are supported, and return an appropriate Vary header so that intermediate caches know to do the same. This is exactly what ServeStatic does, but Amazon S3 currently provides no means of doing this.
The second problem with a push-based approach to handling static files is that it adds complexity and fragility to your deployment process: extra libraries specific to your storage backend, extra configuration and authentication keys, and extra tasks that must be run at specific points in the deployment in order for everything to work. With the CDN-as-caching-proxy approach that ServeStatic takes there are just two bits of configuration: your application needs t
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he URL of the CDN, and the CDN needs the URL of your application. Everything else is just standard HTTP semantics. This makes your deployments simpler, your life easier, and you happier.
There are two answers here. One is that ServeStatic is designed to work in situations where apache, nginx, and the like aren't easily available. But more importantly, it's easy to underestimate what's involved in serving static files correctly. Does your few lines of nginx configuration distinguish between files which might change and files which will never change and set the cache headers appropriately? Did you add the right CORS headers so that your fonts load correctly when served via a CDN? Did you turn on the special nginx setting which allows it to send gzip content in response to an HTTP/1.0 request, which for some reason CloudFront still uses? Did you install the extension which allows you to serve brotli-encoded content to modern browsers?
None of this is rocket science, but it's fiddly and annoying and ServeStatic takes care of all it for you.