Django comes with a lightweight web server to run your code quickly, without needing to spend time configuring a production server. When you run the Django development server, it keeps checking for changes in your code. It reloads automatically, freeing you from manually reloading it after code changes. However, it might not notice some actions, such as adding new files to your project, so you will have to restart the server manually in these cases.

Start the development server by typing the following command from your project's root folder:

python manage.py runserver

You should see something like this:

Performing system checks...

System check identified no issues (0 silenced).
May 06, 2018 - 17:17:31
Django version 2.0.5, using settings 'mysite.settings'
Starting development server at http://127.0.0.1:8000/
Quit the server with CONTROL-C.

Now, open http://127.0.0.1:8000/ in your browser. You should see a page stating that the project is successfully running, as shown in the following screenshot:

The preceding screenshot indicates that Django is running. If you take a look at your console, you will see the GET request performed by your browser:

[06/May/2018 17:20:30] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 16348

Each HTTP request is logged in the console by the development server. Any error that occurs while running the development server will also appear in the console.

You can indicate Django to run the development server on a custom host and port or tell it to run your project, loading a different settings file, as follows:

python manage.py runserver 127.0.0.1:8001 
--settings=mysite.settings

Remember that this server is only intended for development and is not suitable for production use. In order to deploy Django in a production environment, you should run it as a WSGI application using a real web server, such as Apache, Gunicorn, or uWSGI. You can find more information on how to deploy Django with different web servers at https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/2.0/howto/deployment/wsgi/.

Chapter 13, Going Live, explains how to set up a production environment for your Django projects.