Sometimes you don't have a favicon.ico or it's not in your staticfiles because you have a single page javascript or you're just tired of seeing 404s in your debug output.

Here's how you can serve up a hard coded icon (or any file really) directly from django.

I got this transparent icon from transparent-favicon.info

wget http://transparent-favicon.info/favicon.ico
base64 favicon.ico

I put this in my main project urls.py but feel free to put wherever.

# project/urls.py

def favicon(request):
    from textwrap import dedent
    from django.http import HttpResponse
    import base64

    icon = """\
    AAABAAEAEBACAAEAAQCwAAAAFgAAACgAAAAQAAAAIAAAAAEAAQAAAAAAgAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
    AAAAAAAAAAAA////AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
    AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD//wAA//8AAP//AAD//wAA//8AAP//AAD//wAA//8AAP//AAD/
    /wAA//8AAP//AAD//wAA//8AAP//AAD//wAA"""
    icon = dedent(icon)
    icon = base64.b64decode(icon)

    return HttpResponse(icon, content_type="image/x-icon")

urlpatterns += [
    url(r'^favicon.ico', favicon, name='favicon'),
]

OMG I HATE MY LIFE SOMETIMES

So… I'll hopefully write more about this later, but the TL;DR is do not use monitor.py and uwsgi.

So if you have something like this in your wsgi.py, comment it out with extreme prejudice.

import monitor
monitor.start(interval=60)

Symptoms include, but not limited to:

• workers not shutting down
• workers appear to hang and cause 50x errors
• workers not restarting if you send appropriate signals
• workers appear to work once or twice then hang
• workers never work
• randomness and non-determinism all over the f'in place
• little to no helpful log output
• propensity to start adding lots of config variables that you don't understand
• propensity to start drinking
• wondering htf everybody else seems to use this software without a problem
• wondering if perhaps computers where a poor career choice after all

I haven't looked into too closely but I suspect the fact that the monitor opens up it's own thread and runs forever has something to do with it. Open files, open sockets, stuff like that.

Django works much better if you do things the right way. Here are the steps for future me.

more…