Deploying Oscar

Oscar is a just a set of Django apps - it doesn’t have any special deployment requirements. That means the excellent Django docs for deployment should be your first stop. This page adds some additional tips based on experience gained from running Oscar projects.

Performance

Setting up caching is crucial for a good performance. Oscar’s templates are split into many partials, hence it is recommended to use the cached template loader. Sorl also will hit your database hard if you run it without a cache backend.

If your memory constraints are tight and you can only run one Python worker, LocMemCache will usually outperform external cache backends due to the lower overhead. But once you can scale beyond one worker, it might make good sense to switch to something like Memcached or Redis.

Blocking in views should be avoided if possible. That is especially true for external API calls and sending emails. Django’s supports different email backends to allow for switching out the blocking SMTP backend to a custom non-blocking solution. Possible options are storing emails in a database or cache for later consumption or triggering an external worker, e.g. via django-celery. django_post-office works nicely.

For backwards-compatibility reasons, Django doesn’t enable database connection pooling by default. Performance is likely to improve when enabled.

Security

Oscar relies on the Django framework for security measures and therefore no Oscar specific configurations with regard to security are in place. See Django’s guidelines for security for more information.

django-secure is a nice app that comes with a few sanity checks for deployments behind SSL.

Search Engine Optimisation

A basic example of what a sitemap for Oscar could look like has been added to the sandbox site. Have a look at sandbox/urls.py for inspiration.