I don't do anything special for prototyping, I just use what I normally do if I were creating the real thing.

> django-admin startproject > copy+paste my webpack config for React > copy+paste my general management scripts into the package.json (mostly scripts to build the client, and if working locally also start a server)

Then if I want to deploy it, I just install nginx and gunicorn and again copy+paste my configs for those.

If I want to use mysql it's not too much trouble, takes 10 mins to get it up and running and my application hooked up to it.