[Zope] Re: Deployment Best Practices?

[Philipp von Weitershausen]

Jeff McNeil wrote:
> That's not all that obvious to someone new to the Zope system.  Most
> of the documentation I've found is geared towards the 2.x branch.  As
> Zope 3 and Zope 2 are different animals, I wouldn't think that the
> deployment steps and recommendations would be all that similar.

With buildout, they can be similar, at least superficially.

> I really like what I've seen thus far, it's just been difficult at
> times as it feels like I'm fighting with documentation.
> 
> So I'm assuming I'll just need to build up a Zeo server instance with
> zc.zodbrecipes and update my corresponding buildout.cfg for the Zope
> instances?

Yep, you can do that.

> If Buildout is the preferred deployment tool, then my
> redistributable is a sandbox tarball or an RPM containing the skeleton
> files needed to bootstrap a buildout run on the target hosts?

Yes.

> Maybe I'll dump the whole process on a blog somewhere as I step through it.

That'd be cool!

> I do have another question. The project we're working on is plug-in
> based. Within the old system, eggs are loaded dynamically using
> setuptools pkg_resources and we define certain entry points for
> capability registration.  Eggs are added to a directory and a config
> entry is made such that we can load the proper version of each
> plug-in.  Is there an upfront way to reproduce that functionality
> without needing to update setup.py and rerun buildout every time we
> want to push a new plug-in or update an existing?

Well, you could just do the exact same thing that you did in your old 
application, I suppose.

> I'd love to be able
> to just drop an egg on the file system and tell Zope "Here, go load
> that one now" via configuration alone.

You could also write your own ZCML directive (+ a handler) that does 
that. Then you'd only ever have to change your application's site.zcml 
to load a new plugin.

> My apologies if some of this is obvious. As I said, I'm really just
> tackling Zope for the first time.

Don't worry, your questions are valid. We haven't actually done a very 
good job of documenting things on the website.