tgrafise / vs_buildout

Scaffold buildout for new plone projects

Plone 4 buildout

Contents

• Introduction
• Prerequisitements
• Features
• Creating Plone 4 buildout installation
  • Creating your first add-on
  • Managing source code checkouts with buildout
• Operating system specific instructions
  • Ubuntu/Debian
  • OSX
  • Windows

Introduction

Buildout is a tool which automatically downloads, installs and configures Python software. Plone developers prefer uses buildout based installation method - it makes it easy to work with source code and developing your own Plone add-ons.

Prerequisitements

What you need in order to use developer buildout with Plone 4:

• Experience using command line tools
• Experience using a text editor to work with configuration files (buildout.cfg)
• GCC compiler suite to build native Python extensions (Zope contains C code for optimized parts)
• Python 2.7
• Python Distribute installation tool, provided by your operating system or installed by hand

Read below from operating system specific instructions how to install these dependencies.

Features

This buildout provides

• Zope start up scripts (one instance)
• zopeskel command for creating Plone add-ons (different from system-wide installation)
• test command for running automatic test suites
• i18ndude for managing text string translations in Python source code
• mr.developer command for managing source code checkouts and updates with buildout repeatable manner

Creating Plone 4 buildout installation

You need to run (please see remarks regarding your operating system below):

$ python2.7 bootstrap.py -c devel.cfg

This will create bin folder and bin/buildout script. If you any time want to change Python interpreter associated with buildout, or you need to update buildout script itself to newer version please rerun bootstrap.py.

Now you can run buildout script which will download all Python packages (.egg files) and create parts/ and var/ folder structure:

$ ./bin/buildout -c devel.cfg

If this succesfully completes you can start buildout in foreground mode (Press CTRL+C to terminate):

$ ./bin/zeoserver start
$ ./bin/instance1 start

Now you can login to your site

http://localhost:8010

The default user is admin with password admin. After initial start-up admin password is stored in Data.fs databse file and the value in buildout.cfg is ignored. Please follow these instructions to change the admin password.

Creating your first add-on

Plone 4 buildout comes with bin/zopeskel command for creating Plone add-ons.

Create theme

$ cd src
$ ../bin/zopeskel plone_basic

Create Archetypes based content types package:

$ ../bin/zopeskel archetype vs.registration

More info

• Bootstrapping Plone add-on development

Managing source code checkouts with buildout

mr.developer buildout extension command which can be used with buildout to manage your source code repositories mr.developer makes source code checkout from multiple repositores a repeatable task.

Operating system specific instructions

Ubuntu/Debian

Tested for Ubuntu 10.10.

Install prerequisitements:

$ sudo apt-get install python2.7 wget build-essential python2.7-dev python-setuptools

OSX

Install OSX development tools (XCode) from Apple.

Install Macports.

Then the following installs dependencies:

$ sudo port install python27 py27-distribute wget

When you run bootstrap.py use the following command to make sure you are using Python interpreter from Macports:

$ python2.7 bootstrap.py -dc devel.cfg

Windows

Microsoft Windows systems is problematic because it does not provide the Microsoft Visual C compiler (commercial) which is required to build native Python extensions.

Please read

• http://plone.org/documentation/kb/using-buildout-on-windows