I missed that in your prior comment. Yes, I think you are right. Docker --which I kind of hate to admit-- seems to be the only low friction solution at this stage.
This is why I insist that the Django dev team ought to put some thought and effort into fixing this issue. If Django installed in a realistic baseline production configuration (not a toy DB, runserver, etc.) and came out of the box with a super simple mechanism to deploy to the average VPS the framework could become 10x more popular than it is today.
Nobody could blame a developer looking that the Digital Ocean deployment tutorial you linked to and thinking "f-ck this!". I can even see said developer using that as an argument against Python/Django if management was involved in making a platform decision.
There are dozens of articles just like that one that are multiple pages long. To me that constitutes absolute proof that deployment in Django is seriously flawed, if not broken. I hate to say that because I love the framework, but c'mon, the fact that such articles exist pretty much says this is ridiculous.
