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Heroku is supposed to be easy for launching prototypes yet it's a PITA for Django, one of the most popular prototyping frameworks, since they never bothered to build native static file support (their "whitenoise" suggestion creates really crappy performance, so you're forced to setup a whole new static server). Heroku basically exploded in popularity for support of beginner programmers, so idk why they are intent on alienating that group.

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nginx buildpack + python buildpack == nginx to serve static content and gunicorn for the python backend. Of course you now have to know how to set up an nginx config file so it does take away somewhat from the "just works" simplicity of Heroku.

Although even whitenoise is still ok if you're going to set it up with a CDN as the frontend for your static assets. If you want simplicity then you do it using one of the CDN addons.

Whitenoise is not a limitation of the heroku platform, it's really a symptom of suboptimal documentation.

Most projects will run with cloudflare in front, which takes care of static caching.

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