[Zope] Whats the best way to Automatically Start Zope Server on bootup??

[Glyph Lefkowitz]

On Sat, 29 Jan 2000, Chris McDonough wrote:

> *Or*............. just use Windows if you'd rather not be bothered with
> the learning curve on these kinds of issues.  I'm serious.  It can take
> a tremendous amount of time to understand just how the runlevel
> environment works in any UNIX.  For a newbie, the *nix/Zope combination
> requires a serious time investment.  

With all due respect, chris, it is NOT a serious time investment unless
you try to build from sources.  Most major distributions (RedHat and
Debian, at least) have good Zope packages available that automatically set
Zope up to start at startup.  The only tricky part is to know you have to
do

/etc/rc.d/init.d/zope start
/sbin/init.d/zope start
/etc/init.d/zope start

or whatever, but in general, that should be something that users know.

If they really have no clue, then they can reboot the machine and Zope
will come up on startup.

I was able to set up Zope on RedHat, play with it for a while on my
workstation, install it on my server, decide I liked it, upgrade the
server to Debian Potato, and install it again -- no sources, no sweat.  
Jeff Rush's RPMs and the standard Debian packages make the whole process
pretty painless.

If you're a newbie, don't use the source.  It's complicated, and learning
how to build stuff in general takes time.  That's why people make packages
in the first place.  If you're using packages, the process is equally
complicated on Windows and UNIX; in fact, if (somehow -- I won't pretend
*this* is simple ^_^) you're already blessed with a working Debian setup,
Zope installation is a one-line command, and you don't even need to start
it up -- it starts automatically.

The problems associated with using Windows, especially for server
software, are too well-known and well-documented for me to cover here.

The primer on init system shell programming that was given here is a bit
much for the average Zope user.  Something like "start scripts are located
in ..., type .../zope start to start it" should not be, though.

If it is, that person *needs* to deal with the learning curve associated
with computers in general.  Dtml is almost certainly going to beyond their
grasp (it's beyond mine, at least for now! ^_^)

So maybe the answer is "don't use SuSE", but I don't think it's "don't use
linux".

> (In other words, please don't scream at us if it's driving you nuts
> :-)).

That I can respect and agree with :-)

Zope is *AWESOME* and it's free!  I can't see how anyone would be inclined
to scream at you for that.