[Zope-dev] Re: ploneout - Or how using zc.buildout for a common Zope2 project might look like

[Jean-Paul Ladage]

>   - ploneout (http://svn.plone.org/svn/plone/ploneout/trunk) is really 
> an environment that Plone 3 core developers could (should?) use as a 
> consistent way of setting up a Zope 2.10 instance with Plone 3 and all 
> dependencies. It uses svn:externals quite extensively to pull in Plone's 
> source code into src/ (the eggs) and products/ (the products) with the 
> intention that this is the code being developed. Ploneout's README.txt 
> has more information about this scenario.

To through in an extra angle in this discussion, I would like to contribute the following thoughts.

Unless Utopia really exists I think developers all have their own thoughts about setting up their development environment. In my opinion buildout's target should be deployment of complex production systems.

I had to read the buildout documentation twice to even get a grip of it and yesterday I wondered around in a forest of recipes in ploneout. Although I see the value of buildout, copying over the entire buildout to setup a second sandbox, seems like a waste of disk space to me.

We work on quite a number of different projects at once and want to be able to reproduce a working instance (running the production Data.fs preferably). To service our environment we (mainly the van Rees brothers) wrote instancemanager.

We expect a minimal set of requirements:
 - Python installed
 - Zope libraries installed next to each other, e.g.
   /usr/local/zope/2.10.2, each version in a separate folder.

Using instancemanager you can:

* Create / Start / Stop / Restart instances

* Backup / Restore / Pack instance databases

* Install Products

* Run tests

* Generate Apache VirtualHost configs

* Easy upgrade Zope versions

During the Snowsprint we'll finish Windows compatibility and creation of Z3 instances.

Minimal configuration in ~/.instancemanager/userdefaults.py to show instancemanager which zope's are available.

  zope_location_template = '/usr/local/zope/%(zope_verion)'


Each instance is then configured using a project.py.

~/.instancemanager/demo.py   

Inside this project file we can define all needed instance configuration options:

* Initial user and password

* Portnumbers

* Zope / Python version used

* Whether to use zeo, and how many zeo clients

* Sources to install in the Products or lib/python folder

   - symlink_sources : Allow svn checkouts of products to be linked.

   - symlinkbundle_sources : Allow for svn checkouts of bundles (3.0)

   - archive_sources: Allow for official release tar files to be 
     extracted.

   - archivebundle_sources: Allow for official release tar bundles to be 
     extracted.

  Sources are defined as a list of dicts:

      archive_sources = [
        {'url':'http://www.zope.org/Members/shh/DocFinderTab/1.0.1/DocFinderTab-1.0.1.tar.gz'},
        {'url':'http://plone.org/products/clouseau/releases/0.7.1/Clouseau.0.7.1.zip'},
      ]

  Here I defined two developers tools that need to be downloaded and extracted to
  the Products folder of my instance. 
 
      symlinkbundle_sources = [
        {'url':'https://svn.plone.org/svn/plone/bundles/3.0',},
        {'url':'https://svn.plone.org/svn/plone/bundles/3.0-lib',
         'pylib':True,},
        ]
  
  Here I define the 3.0 bundle of Zope Products that will be symlinked and for
  the second we added the key 'pylib' a value of True to indicate this set of sources
  need to be linked in the lib/python folder.

  Sources are downloaded to a configurable location, instancemanager has set the
  following defaults:

     archive_basedir_template = /home/myuser/downloads
     archivebundle_basedir_template = /home/myuser/downloads
  
     symlink_basedir_template = /home/myuser/svn
     symlinkbundle_basedir_template = /home/myuser/svn

  Downloading happens only once, to limit bandwidth.

Again most developers are pretty demanding about setting up a development environment.
Here at Zest most of us are comfortable with instancemanager.

There's an egg available in the cheeseshop, but for the latest features you can also checkout

https://svn.plone.org/svn/collective/instancemanager/trunk 


Kind regards,

Jean-Paul