[Grok-dev] an application installation script?

[Sebastian Ware]

The way I see it, having to add the application through a web UI is  
contrary to the idea of filesystem based development.

I would rather have the application configured by directions in  
setup.py, zope.conf or similar. That way I can store it in SVN. I  
would also like to be able to provide these settings to "grokproject"  
when I create my Grok project instance (with the option of copying an  
existing data.fs file) in order to have my project ready to run  
straight off the bat. (maybe this could be done with eggs, I haven't  
quite figured out how to use them :) )

I would also like a new command "rundevzope" that I could use during  
development (with development settings turned on), whereas  
"runzope" (through "zopectl") is for deployment. Then rundevzope  
could run the application as root if nothing else is specified.

Mvh Sebastian

5 okt 2007 kl. 11.13 skrev Martijn Faassen:

> Hi there,
>
> Some of us have done some more thinking about the application  
> installation concerns voiced in the Admin UI discussions.
>
> We have two different scenarios:
>
> * development
>
> * deployment
>
> For deployment a pretty strong case can be made that in some cases  
> you'd not want people to go to the web UI at all to install an  
> application. Of course, this is mostly from a *nix perspective - on  
> Windows for instance people might very well prefer to install an  
> application by clicking on a UI.
>
> For development the case seems less strong. We've heard Philipp  
> report that this is confusing for beginners. I hadn't noticed this  
> in the Grok tutorial I gave and others don't seem to have noticed  
> this either.
>
> One feature that is currently missing is the way to configure a  
> particular application to act as the 'root', so that no further  
> virtual hosting configuration is needed. This feature would be  
> useful during deployment in particular.
>
> This feature could be triggered from the Grok UI, but that won't  
> help in some deployment scenarios.
>
> So let's sketch out a design:
>
> * the ZODB knows which applications are installed
>
> * the ZODB can be configured to make one application the traversal  
> root.
>
> * there is a UI to configure this. For deployment, it should be  
> possible not to install the UI.
>
> * there is also a command-line tool to configure this. This can be  
> used to talk to Grok (perhaps by using XML-RPC or REST, or perhaps  
> by mounting the ZODB directly) and set up applications and the  
> root, or also to remove applications or 'de-root' the root.
>
> The deployment installation scenario would be:
>
> * run buildout
>
> * a tool has been generated in 'bin'. Doing "bin/groksetup foo" or  
> whatever would set up application "foo" as the default root.  
> (details to be worked out. This is a command-line UI issue).
>
> * we could research whether this tool could be made to run as the  
> last buildout step (and what would happen if you ran buildout  
> multiple times).
>
> There is some benefit to letting such installation be an explicit  
> step. I think this would be okay for sysadmins. It might be a  
> problem if this is also for newbies.
>
> Opinions?
>
> Regards,
>
> Martijn
>
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