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A buildout nano-framework for building Plone 4 sites

Framework minimalista basado en buildout para construir sitios Plone 4 con estrategias de backup y despliegue estandarizadas.

1 min read Noe Nieto
plone buildout repozo backup

We are rolling out our 6th Plone deployment and I wanted to adopt the most standard way of rolling our backups. After some tinkering, I came up with what I call a nano-framework for buildout configuration.

As I stated above, we are rolling out our 6th Plone 4 deployment. On the very first deployments we tried very different backup strategies, and lately we adopted the "no backup at all" strategy as it was the easiest one to do. (sigh!) We have been very lucky so far, but we will not forever. So I tried to group all the buildout tricks I have learned in the last two years and put together this buildout system.

This all started with me worrying about backups, so I started looking around until I found some guidelines. The recommended way to backup Plone is by using repozo and a set of associated recipes for buildout. But Plone 4 also uses plone.app.blob by default and on the #plone IRC channel I was recommended two readings:

Based on that, and after some months of testing, I finally arrived at a nano framework based on buildout. I'll describe it so anyone — even me — can understand this stuff after some months have passed:

  • buildout.cfg: This file does not exist. I deleted it. It can be created by symlinking to another file. You should run bin/buildout -c file.cfg instead.
  • base.cfg: Base configuration file. It defines the Plone version and the base settings for one Plone instance. It also adds support for Diazo/XDV.
  • development.cfg: Extends base.cfg and adds support for mr.developer or omelette.
  • deployment.cfg: Extends base.cfg and adds ZEO, one more Plone instance for debugging, automatic Apache configuration generation, supervisor, maintenance and backup scripts.
  • custom-settings.cfg: This file gets included in the aforementioned config files. It contains all the definitions that make this buildout unique. You also list the extra Plone libraries you want to use here.
  • versions.cfg: Pinned down versions of Python packages.
  • password.cfg: User and password for the Zope admin.

If you want to take a look at the config files of this nano_buildout, I uploaded one to GitHub, so you can get a copy of it.

https://github.com/tzicatl/Plone-4-nano-buildout-framework

I'd love to have some feedback.