Is "channels" in INSTALLED_APPS required in production?

[jonaswinkler]

Hello!

The documentation states that we should add "channels" to INSTALLED_APPS. This will in turn enable runserver to run the ASGI application. I've noticed that running my application in production with daphne or gunicorn+uvicorn works fine even without "channels" in the app list.

Question: Are there any drawbacks to not including 'channels' in INSTALLED_APPS? I'm considering to include the "channels" application only when DEBUG is enabled.

Background: I'm running an application that also starts a lot of background processes, each importing the settings and therefore channels (+daphne and dependencies) as well. That's quite a bit of allocated resources that aren't exactly needed, and the app is also supposed to run decent on low power devices.

Thank you very much!

[carltongibson]

Installed apps are needed for detection of models, commands and templates. (I think that's it).

Likely yes, you don't need those.

[jonaswinkler]

Thanks for the clarification.

I've looked at the source before, and the only thing the channels application does is to monkey patch the runserver command. I was not entirely sure if including the channels app has some other required side effects that aren't immediately visible.

[KStenK]

After we had the same issues like #1639 and our production server workers did not boot up, then removing channels from INSTALLED_APPS fixed that problem for us and everything seems to work fine so far.