Is it possible to deploy a django project without using third party tools like nginx or apache just to serve up https:// webpages? Being forced to setup a reverse proxy or some other web server just to serve https seems a bit overkill.
manage.py runserver) is a bad idea for production environment. But, yes you can use SSL connection even with built-in serverjust for https. These allows you to effectively control other server resources like max number of processes, request/response headers, etc. WEB servers support many features that you can set without writing python code. And that will be more understandable for infra/server engineers.