The Plone Expanse

A bit of Plone, Zope and a dash of everything else

@2019 Tiberiu Ichim

Zope buildout quickstart

Python, zope2, zope3, cookbook, Linux

Sat, Feb 10, 2007, 400 Words

One of the bigger players in the latest move to automate Plone and Zope development and deployment has been buildout, so I figured it's about time to start learning it and see how it can help me. I'm writing this short recipe as I progress through learning buildout to help me remember this stuff later on.

Installing buildout

The easiest way to install buildout is to get easy_install (a manager for python packages) on your system. In order to get it installed, I had to do: (based on a custom python 2.4.3 installation in /opt/python):

$mkdir ~/buildout_play
$cd ~/buildout_play
$wget http://peak.telecommunity.com/dist/ez_setup.py
$sudo /opt/python/bin/python ez_setup.py

Next, install the zc.buildout package, using easy_install:

/opt/python/bin/easy_install zc.buildout

This will install the buildout egg in the python site-packages folder and create a 'buildout' script in the scripts folder, in my case /opt/python/bin/buildout.

Next, transform the buildout_play folder in buildout folder, by running:

/opt/python/bin/buildout -v

This will "bootstrap" that folder and prepare it as a buildout environment, also installing the setuptools and zc.buildout eggs. The buildout script will check every time it's being ran if those eggs are at their latest version, run it with the -N option if you want to skip that.

As a simple test for buildout, I've modified my buildout.cfg to contain the following lines:

[buildout]
parts = checkout

[checkout]
recipe = zc.recipe.zope3checkout
url = svn://svn.zope.org/repos/main/Zope3/trunk

This tells buildout to include a part named checkout, which is defined to use the "zc.recipe.zope3checkout" recipe, that is configured with the "url" option. Running

/opt/python/bin/buildout -v -N

will automatically grab the zc.recipe.zope3checkout egg, do a svn checkout in the parts/checkout folder and then compile in place the zope 3 checkout.

When developing new projects, to make this process easier, it is possible to put a bootstrap.py script in the folder where you're developing, which will automatically install setuptools (easy_install) and zc.buildout, transform that folder in a buildout folder and put a bin/bootstrap script that can be ran to do the build.

These are the basics to get started, see below for further details.

Reference

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