The server config in the gist is definitely just a proxy, forwarding all of the requests through to gunicorn. Many people add more to the configuration block, t

The server config in the gist is definitely just a proxy, forwarding all of the requests through to gunicorn. Many people add more to the configuration block, to do something like serve static assets with nginx rather than their Flask application. From the top paragraph of http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/0.11/deploying/ http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/0.11/deploying/: "While lightweight and easy to use, Flask’s built-in server is not suitable for production as it doesn’t scale well and by default serves only one request at a time. Some of the options available for properly running Flask in production are documented here." In short, the Flask server is not really written or tuned for production, so we use gunicorn or wsgi which are WSGI containers that are production ready :)