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I'm currently doing R&D for a web application which we plan to host ourselves initially and then allow customers to self host.

My task has been evaluating web frameworks to see which would give us the biggest productivity initially and ease of maintence while also allowing us to easily support deployment to customer controlled environments.

Our team has experience with ASP.NET (MVC and Webforms) and Ruby on Rails.

Our experience with Rails is that Windows deployment is a very taboo subject and any questions on IRC or StackOverflow are met with knee jerk "why not Linux" responses. However in this case our target market may be running windows or Linux servers.

  • Is this also the case in Django land?
  • Is it possible with rubbish performance?
  • Is it possible with lost of pain?
  • Is it seen as reasonable and not treated as a completely stupid idea for not wanting to run Linux?
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  • it's not as 'taboo' as might have experienced on the RoR community; but it's certainly not as easy or convenient as on any POSIX platform. Python definitely runs very well on windows, and Apache is well supported too. Still, you would be very limited on deployment options, and IIS is (mostly) out of the question. (i'm not writing this as an answer because i haven't personally done it (nor plan to))
    – Javier
    Commented Nov 13, 2011 at 3:31
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    You should flag knee jerk "why not Linux" responses on StackOverflow as "not an answer"...
    – yannis
    Commented Nov 13, 2011 at 5:04
  • @YannisRizos Thanks for cleaning my question up, editing markdown on an iPhone without a preview is a bit of a pain! :P
    – Daniel Upton
    Commented Nov 13, 2011 at 21:31
  • "Why not Linux" makes sense here since it's trivial to set up a virtual Linux machine. Even easier with tech like Vagrant. I use that setup a lot.
    – Kos
    Commented Dec 29, 2013 at 15:24

1 Answer 1

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Windows is a second class citizen in most open source communities because it treats them as second class citizens. Development and sysadmin on Windows is unnecessarily painful, especially for people who are used to Unix-based systems.

That said, Python on Windows works very well and Django doesn't do anything particularly abnormal so I don't see why you wouldn't be able to make it work.

I suspect the main issues won't be with Django itself, but the surrounding stuff like mod_wsgi, etc. Windows is bound to get in your way at some point.

"Why not Linux" is a valid question to ask. The cost of one additional server vs the extra time required to deal with Windows will likely decide the answer.

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  • Thanks for your answer, don't get me wrong i love all things unixy.. In this case it's not us looking to host on windows to avoid buying another box ourself.. it's ultimately our customers who would suffer as this would be availaible to self-host too, and from our experience the guys who would buy this app would likely be a microsoft shop. That brings up the whole "Why not .NET question".. Just trying to find a happy medium between developer productivity and customer needs :D
    – Daniel Upton
    Commented Nov 13, 2011 at 21:38

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