zopeproject 0.3.2

Quickstart

You can start a new Zope-based web application from scratch with just a two commands:

$ easy_install zopeproject
$ zopeproject MyZopeProj

The second command will ask you for the name and password for an initial administrator user. It will also ask you where to put the Python packages (“eggs”) that it downloads. This way multiple projects created with zopeproject can share the same packages and won’t have to download them each time.

After asking the questions, zopeproject will download the zc.buildout package that will be used to build the sandbox, unless it is already installed locally. Then it will invoke buildout to download Zope and its dependecies. If you’re doing this for the first time or not sharing packages between different projects, this may take a while.

When zopeproject is done, you will find a typical Python package development environment in the MyZopeProj directory: the package itself (myzopeproj) and a setup.py script. There’s also a bin directory that contains scripts, such as paster which can be used to start the application:

$ cd MyZopeProj
$ bin/paster serve deploy.ini

After starting the application with paster, you should now be able to go to http://localhost:8080 and see the default start screen of Zope. You will also be able to log in with the administrator user account that you specified earlier.

Command line options

--no-buildout

When invoked with this option, zopeproject will only create the project directory with the standard files in it, but it won’t download and invoke zc.buildout.

--newer

This option enables the newest = true setting in buildout.cfg. That way, buildout will always check for newer versions of eggs online. If, for example, you have outdated versions of your dependencies in your shared eggs directory, this switch will force the download of newer versions. Note that you can always edit buildout.cfg to change this behaviour in an existing project area, or you can invoke bin/buildout with the -n option.

--svn-repository=REPOS

This option will import the project directory and the files in it into the given subversion repository and provide you with a checkout of the trunk. REPOS is supposed to be a repository path that is going to be created, along with tags, branches and trunk below that.

-v, --verbose

When this option is enabled, zopeproject won’t hide the output of easy_install (used to install zc.buildout) and the buildout command.

What are the different files for?

deploy.ini

Configuration file for PasteDeploy. It defines which server software to launch and which WSGI application to invoke upon each request (which is defined in myzopeproj/application.py). You may also define WSGI middlewares here. Invoke bin/paster serve with this file as an argument.

zope.conf

This file will be read by the application factory in myzopeproj/application.py. Here you can define which ZCML file the application factory should load upon startup, the ZODB database instance, an event log as well as whether developer mode is switched on or not.

site.zcml

This file is referred to by zope.conf and will be loaded by the application factory. It is the root ZCML file and includes everything else that needs to be loaded. That typically is just the application package itself, myzopeproj, which then goes on to include its dependencies. Apart from this, site.zcml also defines the anonymous principal and the initial admin principal.

setup.py

This file defines the egg of your application. That includes the package’s dependencies (mostly Zope eggs) and the entry point for the PasteDeploy application factory.

buildout.cfg

This file tells zc.buildout what to do when the buildout is executed. This mostly involves executing setup.py to enable the MyZopeProj egg (which also includes downloading its dependencies), as well as installing PasteDeploy for the server. This files also refers to the shared eggs directory (eggs-directory) and determines whether buildout should check whether newer eggs are available online or not (newest).

Adding dependencies to the application

The standard setup.py and configure.zcml files list a set of standard dependencies that is typical for most Zope applications. You may obviously remove things from this list, but typically you’ll want to re-use libraries that others have written. Many, if not most, of additional Zope and third party libraries are listed on the Python Cheeseshop.

Let’s say you wanted to reuse the some.library package in your application. The first step would be to add it to the list of dependencies in setup.py (install_requires). If this package defined any Zope components, you would probably also have to load its ZCML configuration by adding the following line to myzopeproj/configure.zcml:

<include package="some.library" />

After having changed setup.py, you would want the newly added dependency to be downloaded and added to the search path of bin/paster. To do that, simply invoke the buildout:

$ bin/buildout

0.3.2 (2007-07-17)

• If the user already has a default eggs directory set in ~/.buildout/default.cfg, it is used as the default value for the eggs directory.

• Greatly improved the README.txt file.

0.3.1 (2007-07-15)

• The buildout.cfg template was missing settings for the shared eggs directory and thew newest flag.

• Assemble the default path for the eggs directory in a Windows-friendly way.

0.3 (2007-07-14)

• Renamed to zopeproject.

• Incorporated much of the grokproject 0.5.x infrastructure. This makes it much more robust, especially when launching zc.buildout.

• Merged make-zope-app and deploy-zope-app back into one command: zopeproject.

0.2 (2007-07-12)

• Renamed to make-zope-app.

• Split mkzopeapp into two commands: make-zope-app and deploy-zope-app.

• No longer use zope.paste for the application factory. Instead, each application that’s created from the skeleton defines its own factory (which is reasonably small and gains flexibility).

• Get rid of the start<<Project>> script. Simply use bin/paster serve deploy.ini for starting the server.

• Use the Paste#http server by default.

0.1 (2007-07-06)

Initial release as mkzopeapp