2 Answers. You don’t. That’s the simple answer, anyway — you don’t need it. uWSGI is itself a capable server.

Gunicorn is a pre-fork worker model ported from Ruby’s Unicorn project. The uWSGI project aims at developing a full stack for building hosting services. Gunicorn and uWSGI are primarily classified as “Web Servers” and “Web Server Interface” tools respectively. Gunicorn and uWSGI are both open source tools.

CherryPy: Fast performance, lightweight, and low errors. Not bad for pure Python. Gunicorn: A good, consistent performer for medium loads.

Gunicorn3 is the “ classic” and industry-standard Python production server. Compared to its competitors, the biggest thing that shapes Gunicorn as a separate entity is its ability to manage workers.

The Gunicorn “Green Unicorn” (pronounced jee-unicorn or gun-i-corn) is a Python Web Server Gateway Interface (WSGI) HTTP server. It is a pre-fork worker model, ported from Ruby’s Unicorn project.

uwsgi (all lowercase) is the native binary protocol that uWSGI uses to communicate with other servers. uWSGI is often used for serving Python web applications in conjunction with web servers such as Cherokee and Nginx, which offer direct support for uWSGI’s native uwsgi protocol.

Short answer: Use Gunicorn, unless you are deploying on Windows, in which case use mod_wsgi. So, from the operating system’s point of view, your Django project becomes a part of the WSGI server; it is the same process. The way application() is called is standardized by the WSGI specification.

Nginx is “a web server which can also be used as a reverse proxy, load balancer, mail proxy and HTTP cache”. uWSGI is an implementation of the WSGI spec, which describes how a web server should communicate with a web app, which makes uWSGI also a type of web server.

uWSGI is often used for serving Python web applications in conjunction with web servers such as Cherokee and Nginx, which offer direct support for uWSGI’s native uwsgi protocol. For example, data may flow like this: HTTP client ↔ Nginx ↔ uWSGI ↔ Python app.

Gunicorn: A Python WSGI HTTP Server for UNIX. Gunicorn is a pre-fork worker model ported from Ruby’s Unicorn project. The Gunicorn server is broadly compatible with various web frameworks, simply implemented, light on server resources, and fairly speedy; uWSGI: uWSGI application server container.

Drawbacks to Gunicorn are much the same as uWSGI, though I personally have found Gunicorn to be more easily configurable than uWSGI. It still isn’t as quick or simple to configure and set up as using mod_wsgi with Apache, but on a performance level there is no comparison.

The plus side to using uWSGI is that it is very light weight, runs separately from your web server (so as not to overload your web server processes), and is relatively easy to set up. A few of the cons are the overhead of having to set up another server apart from your web server, and needing to proxy from your main web server to uWSGI.

Some aim to be a full-stack solution while others are well-suited for specific frameworks — Gunicorn, for example, works with Django right out of the box. Here is a closer look at six WSGI servers on the market today — Bjoern, uWSGI, mod_wsgi, Meinheld, CherryPy and Gunicorn.