collective.releaser 0.7.1

Setting up your environement

The first thing to do to work smoothly with zc.buildout is to set up a few things on your environment that apply globally to any Buildout-based applications.

Put two files in your home directory:

• HOME/.buildout/.httpauth: this file will contain the authentication information if the system tries to reach a http(s) ressource which is password protected (like a svn server or a private web site). It is a text file where each line is: realm,url,user,password

  For example:

  trac,https://svn.ingeniweb.com,user,password
  pypi,http://products.ingeniweb.com,user,password

  This is used by lovely.buildouthttp.

• HOME/.buildout/default.cfg: This file set some defaults values, so Buildout can cache and spare downloaded eggs.

  For example:

  [buildout]
  download-cache = /home/tarek/.buildout/downloads
  eggs-directory = /home/tarek/.buildout/eggs

Next, you need to make sure you can release your eggs to several targets, because you may want some private eggs not to be published on PyPI. At this time, the only software that provides the same web services than PyPI is Plone Software Center >= 1.5.

To make it possible to handle several PyPI-like servers, we need to install a small add-on, called collective.dist:

$ easy_install collective.dist

This will allow you to define several servers in your ~/.pypirc file. For instance if you are working with a private PyPI-like server you can define it like this in HOME/.pypirc

[distutils]
index-servers =
    pypi
    ingeniweb-public

[pypi]
username:ingeniweb
password:secret

[ingeniweb-public]
repository:http://products.ingeniweb.com/catalog
username:ingeniweb
password:secret

Last, you need to define the release strategy configuration, that will define for each target server the list of packages that must be released there (regular expressions) and the command sequence that is used with setup.py. Here’s a default example, that can be added in your .pypirc as well, by completing the sections with release-command and release-packages variables:

...

[ingeniweb-public]
...
release-command = mregister sdist build_mo bdist_egg mupload
release-packages =
    ^iw\..*

[pypi]
...
release-command = mregister sdist build_mo bdist_egg mupload
release-packages =
    ^plone\..*
    ^collective\..*

This will push all eggs that starts with plone. or collective. to PyPI and all eggs that starts with iw. to ingeniweb-public. The command used to push the packages are defined by command.

Creating the project structure

Every project must be structured the same way:

$ paster create -t releaser_project my_project

This will ask you for a few values:

• project_name: the name of the project

• project_repo: the root of the subversion repository

• some more values that can be left to default.

This will generate a set of folders in my_project:

$ ls my_project
./buildout
./bundles
./docs
./packages
./releases

Each folder has a role:

• buildout: contains the buildout configuration files

• bundles: contains the bundle used to work in develop mode

• docs: contains the documentation about the project

• packages: contains the egg-based package(s)

• releases: contains the releases of the buildout

This structure must be commited in subversion:

$ svn import my_project http://some.svn/my_project -m "initial commit"

You will then be able to work in your buildout.

Creating egg-based package

From there you can add some packages into the project, by putting them in the packages folder, by using any template available in ZopeSkel.

Be carefull though, you must use a trunk/tags/branches structure in packages for each project.

$ cd my_projet/packages
$ paster create -t plone plone.example
$ package_svn_prepare plone.example

The last command just does the following:

$ mv plone.example plone.example_md5_of_plone.example
$ mkdir plone.example
$ mkdir plone.example/tags plone.example/branches
$ mv plone.example_md5_of_plone.example plone.example/trunk
$ svn add plone.example
$ svn ci -m "initial import of  plone.example"

Do not use trunk as a package name with paster, as this will generate bad metadata in the package.

A special section can be added into setup.cfg, in order to send a mail everytime the package is released:

[mail_hook]
hook = collective.releaser:mail
from = support@ingeniweb.com
emails =
     trac@lists.ingeniweb.com

If your system does not have a SMTP server, you will need to add the name of a SMTP server, and its port in your .pypirc file, in a mail_hook section:

[mail_hook]
host = smtp.neuf.fr
port = 25

From there you can bind the package to your buildout, with a develop variable, in your my_project/buildout folder:

[buildout]
...
develop=
    .../packages/monprojet.reports/trunk

The bundle folder can also be used to set svn:externals to make it simpler to work in the buildout.

Releasing eggs

Releasing eggs is done by calling release from a package:

$ python setup.py release
running release
This package is version 0.1.2
Do you want to run tests before releasing ? [y/N]: N
Do you want to create the release ? If no, you will just be able to deploy again the current release [y/N]: Y
Enter a version [0.1.2]: 0.1.2
Commiting changes...
Creating branches...
...

This will take care of:

• upgrading the setup.py version

• creating a branch and a tag in svn

• pushing the package to the various PyPI-like servers

• sending a mail with the changes, if the mail_hook section was provided in setup.cfg

If you want to release a package from a non-svn folder then use this command to disable specific svn hooks:

$ python setup.py release --pre-hook --post-hook

You can also use some parameters to avoid command line prompt:

$ python setup.py release -a --version=0.1.3

Releasing the project

Releasing the project consists of calling project_release then project_deploy.

project_release will just create a new branch in subversion:

$ cd my_project/buildout
$ project_release --no-archive --version=0.1

This will copy my_project/buildout to my_project/releases/0.1 in subversion. You can then work in this release, to pinpoint the versions in your buildout. A good practice is to create a dedicated cfg file for deployment.

The next step is to generate a tarball with project_deploy:

$ cd /tmp
$ svn co http://somesvn/my_projet/releases/0.1 my_project
$ cd my_project
$ project_deploy prod.cfg

This will build a tarball in /tmp using VirtualEnv, and set everything up so the buildout can be reinstalled offline anywhere with this archive.

The resulting release can be installed with two lines:

$ python boostrap.py
$ bin/buildout

Upgrading an existing buildout

To upgrade an existing buildout, you can use the project_release command. It will create a tarball with all eggs needed to run the project and the .cfg files.

Run it in your buildout, by pointing the .cfg and by providing a name of the archive:

$ cd my_project/buildout
$ project_release --version=0.2

This will release all develop eggs found in dev.cfg. If your dev.cfg look like:

[buildout]
parts = eggs
develop =
  ../my.package
  ../my.other

[eggs]
recipe = zc.recipe.egg
eggs =
  my.package
  my.other

Then my.package and my.other will be released and then added to an archive with all .cfg files.

If you have a static version in your prod.cfg:

[buildout]
parts = eggs
versions = versions

[versions]
my.package = 0.1

[eggs]
recipe = zc.recipe.egg
eggs =
  my.package
  my.other

Then only my.other will be released but both added to the archive.

The default config file of the archive (eg: buildout.cfg) will look like this:

[buildout]
extends = prod.cfg
versions = versions

[versions]
my.package=0.1
my.other=0.2

So you can just run ./bin/buildout on your production server to use the correct packages versions.