Gunicorn by Benoît Chesneau

Gunicorn (Green Unicorn) is a widely used Python WSGI HTTP server designed to serve Python web applications efficiently. It is particularly popular for deploying Django and Flask applications in production environments. Gunicorn is a pre-fork worker model server, meaning it spawns multiple worker processes to handle incoming requests, making it highly scalable and performant. Unlike ASGI servers like Daphne or Uvicorn, which handle asynchronous applications, Gunicorn is best suited for synchronous WSGI applications, making it an excellent choice for traditional web apps that don’t require WebSockets or long-lived connections.

Gunicorn is easy to set up and configure, requiring minimal modifications to an application’s code. It works well with reverse proxies like NGINX to improve performance, manage SSL termination, and provide load balancing. Since it’s compatible with various worker types, such as sync, eventlet, gevent, and Tornado, developers can fine-tune Gunicorn’s behavior based on their application’s needs. Its reliability, simplicity, and ability to handle concurrent requests efficiently make Gunicorn a go-to solution for deploying Python web applications in production environments.