Any thoughts on that approach?
But, it optimizes for something that only matters if you're in a space constrained setup. Turns out for "almost-all" web setups, a few extra hundreds of MBs don't matter even a few GB possibly.
Even in AWS Lambda where cold-start is king, size doesn't matter[0] - I am the top answer. As long as you have fast starts and that's determined by code paths, libraries etc.
So as long as your program readies itself quickly, having gcc and a few other std libs don't impact any key metric.
[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/69512271/will-the-cold-s...
In there, you'll find the settings.py split by environment (like you would have in the Elixir world), and a multistage Docker image designed to be cache-friendly (for faster Docker builds). Some stages even run the test suite, so it could be compared to a CI pipeline.
Not having build dependencies in the production image is definitely a good approach.