Some short videos taken during Plone Paris Sprint 2008 that can show you the ambiance of a sprint with big and small teams.

On Saturday morning

On Saturday afternoon

In this post we describe how to install and configure an apache server in front of zope with buildout.
It’s very simple. Ok let’s go

1 - Create an zope instance with buildout

If you have a paster in your system we create an buildout skeleton with it:

$ paster create -t plone3_buildout

This create an buildout.cfg witch create an zope server (listen in 8080)

$ python2.4 bootstrap.py
$ bin/buildout

Create an instance named plone

$ bin/instance start

Ok now with your favourite browser you can see in http://localhost:8080/plone
the plone instance..
We can declare a localdns (for test purpose) that says that www.testit.com go to localhost..
So http://www.testit.com:8080/plone works also.

2 - Apache serve your plone instance

It’s possible now with buildout
We add an apache server to serve our zope in http port
Edit buildout.cfg and put this config in buildout::

[buildout]
parts =
...
apachebuild
apacheconf
...
[apachebuild]
recipe = plone.recipe.apache:build
url = http://mir2.ovh.net/ftp.apache.org/dist/httpd/httpd-2.2.8.tar.gz

[apacheconf]
recipe = plone.recipe.apache:config
bind = 80
backends =
 www.testit.com:127.0.0.1:8080
zope2_vhm_map =
 www.testit.com:/plone

You have already an httpd installed in your system . No problem
delete apachebuild conf and add in apacheconf a new directive mainconfig as this

[apacheconf]
mainconfig = /etc/apache2/apache2.conf
recipe = plone.recipe.apache:config
bind = 80
backends =
 www.testit.com:127.0.0.1:10080
zope2_vhm_map =
 www.testit.com:/plone

BE CAREFUL : the user that launch buildout must write in mainconfig so give to him the good right !! Also in order to work the current apache server must have rewrite and proxy module allowed.

So now relaunch buildout::

# bin/buildout
Getting distribution for 'plone.recipe.apache'.
Got plone.recipe.apache 0.1.0.
...
apachebuild: Downloading apache tarball.
apachebuild: Compiling Apache
...
apachebuild: Unpacking and configuring
checking for chosen layout... Apache
...
Installing apacheconf.

And after, start (or restart) apache server

# sudo bin/apachectl start

and now::
http://www.testit.com/ go to your plone instance.. Viva buildout !

The Pimp my Buildbot project that was started here at Ingeniweb some time ago, to be able to set up a buildbot in a matter of minutes with zc.buildout, was continued during the sprint, and the guys did a great job on it.

It will be used here in customer projects with a Paster that adds buildbot support when a project starts, because it is a waste of time for the developers to set everything everytime.

Jean-Francois Roche, Kai Lautaportti and Gael Pasgrimaud added extensive configuration options (mail, scheduling), and made the SVN Poller works. This feature allows for instance to make the buildbot watch a SVN repository without having to add a hook in the server (post-commit hook for instance), when you don’t own it (SourceForge, collective, etc)

The tool is released in the collective, and available at the Cheeseshop in one single package !

If you want to set a buildbot

• provide for each one of your project a buildout that has a test script
• make sure the test script returns exit code (–with-exit-status with zope.testing)
• create a buildout cfg file using collective.buildbot
• run buildout, that’s it !
• run the master, slaves scripts, and go to the /waterfall page

Just try out our own buildbot by running this sequence:

$ cd /tmp/
$ mkdir my_bot
$ cd my_bot/
$ svn co https://ingeniweb.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/ingeniweb/buildbot/trunk .
$ python bootstrap.py
$ bin/buildout
$ bin/master start
$ bin/linux_debian start   (that's our slave)

You should have a buildbot running then at http://localhost:9000/waterfall

The tool, without the polling stuff, also works with Mercurial and Bzr, but probably needs more tests with these repositories. We also need to make sure the slaves works fine under Windows, and add a nice front page to the buildbot.

If you use it let us know !

The main task I worked on during the sprint with Alex and Matthew was making PloneSoftwareCenter ready for the new version of Plone.org. These guys rock. We did tons of things and the new plone.org website is coming up. Alex worked for quite a while on migrating plone.org to plone 3, but let me focus on the software center part.

First of all, let me explain what is the final goal of the work done in the software center.

The future of Plonistas: a 100 % egg-based world and what is means for production

Since a few years, Zope code base was moved into a set of namespaced packages. Plone is following closely. From there zc.buildout is providing a simple way to pick up the right set of packages to build an application. This set is automatically chosen by recipes at Zope and Plone level. Then developers add their own packages and dependencies to provide custom features in their applications.

This mechanism means that each team has to:

• make distributions of packages (tarball, eggs, ..)
• build the application with buildout, then release a source distribution
• and provide a way for other developers to build the application on their own, by:
  • publishing the buildout configuration files
  • pushing the packages the buildout uses into to a server that is reachable by developers
  • make sure Plone and Zope packages are also reachable

This means that each team is responsible at least to release packages.

Distutils and Cheeseshop

Distutils provides two commands to publish packages to the world: register and upload. These commands were intended to provide to the developer a way to push packages to any server that supports the protocol, by using the –repository option.

But in reality, the only server that is publicly available is the Cheeseshop (pypi.python.org). Furthermore Distutils is not providing everything needed to work with another server than the Cheeseshop, like I will explain later in this post. So all Plone and Zope packages are uploaded there.

Therefore, pypi.python.org became a single point of failure when you need to build a Plone or Zope application. With the growth of the community, this means that the repository will get bigger and have to deal with more and more request. PyPI weight around 4 gigas at this time, of zip files and tarballs.

While the actual server is really fast, it makes it a bit hard to work when it is down. It didn’t happen often. Twice as far as I remember. But when it happens, the crowd that uses zc.buildout is frozen because they run buildouts several time per day. They can use cache of course, as long as those are up-to-date.

Some mirrors emerged, like http://release.ingeniweb.com/pypi.python.org-mirror. Some enhanced indexes were created as well, like http://download.zope.org/simple, which is still referring to pypi.python.org but performs a bit of crawling to speed things up when a buildout uses it through easy_install.

But all of these are just enhancement to a cheeseshop-centric model.

Furthermore, in case of a private application, you do not want to see packages in the Cheeseshop but you might also want to provide developers a similar way to manage and use them.

Plone.org software center is dying !

For public applications, given the fact that Distutils provides a simple way to push a package to a public location (one shell command), people have started to stop updating the Products section of Plone.org. This happens because updating it means doing a whole lot more than the simple register+upload call. You need to login into the website, then manually upload the packages, then change the front page of the product if needed etc..

So being able to push packages to plone.org with the same set of commands, is the right solution for developers.

Pushing a package means uploading a public archive but it also means updating the front page for the given package, with the register command.

That what I worked on, at PloneSoftwareCenter level, continuing Sidnei’s work: making it act like Cheeseshop. Now the feature is ready and being alpha-tested at new.plone.org

Toward a distributed model

What we will be able to do from there, is to distribute packages (in blue) to the Cheeseshop (2) as usual, but also to Plone.org (1). Having such a tool also allows people to run other cheeseshop-like servers, wether they are public (3) or private (4). This is useful when you are working on customer projects and do not wish to make their packages available to the world, or even if it is a public project, you do not want to push them to PyPi.

Furthermore, it allows having a bit of redundancy : your packages become available in several places, which is better. Think about the mirrors at Sourceforge, same thing here…

This distributed model is used at Ingeniweb, and in other companies I am starting to list (If you do please let me know, this is important to promote the tool).

The new Plone Software Center (PSC)

If you are extensively working with packages and buildouts, you should consider trying the new PSC, read http://tarekziade.wordpress.com/2008/03/20/how-to-run-your-own-private-pypi-cheeseshop-server/ for this. Each project now in the software center can hold several eggs, and it makes it possible to provide a nice deployment model for your teams: developer push packages releases in such a server with the distutils standards, while customers or deployers can build their applications by picking them up through their buildouts.

And it is in Plone, so you can provide extensive features, like a bug tracker, and all the sweet things Plonecan provide.

The work left to be done in PSC is :

• making the storage for archives (tgz, egg) pluggable so new storing strategies can be provided in separate packages, under the collective.psc namespace, I started this work in a branch.
• finish the collective.psc.mirroring package, that will be used in plone.org to fill a system folder, in order to provide an Apache direct view over the archives stored. This will make zc.buildout / easy_install use this stream rather than hitting the Plone instance. Although the final goal will be to transform it into a storage strategy, but time is running and this is useful now for plone.org.
• extensive tests on new.plone.org

collective.dist

To be able to deal with several servers, I have released collective.dist after the sprint (previously iw.dist). This package provides two new distutils commands: mupload and mregister, together with a new pypirc format.

Follow the documentation, and you will be set in a matter of minutes. This package is already used by many developers to make their life easier, and will help you when the new plone.org goes live.

disutils evolution

collective.dist is an evolution of distutils I have been working at Python level for months. It is available as a Python patch here : http://bugs.python.org/issue1858. mregister and mupload are just modified register and upload commands that makes it possible to interact with several PyPi-like servers, that’s it. PSC uses Distutils standards in any case, so it is possible to use the regular register and upload commands with it of course. It is just not convenient because you will need to have the same username and password on both CheeseShop and the third-party egg server (or change your pypirc file everytime :D)

So the patch, basically, just makes the -r option of distutils commands a 100% operational.

Now my job is to convince Python core developers it should be integrated into Python 2.6, and I am working on this. It is a logical evolution, but it sounds overkill to some people that does not have this kind of need: “Why changing that ? we have only one package server, which is the cheeseshop”.

It can also sound to some of them like I am (together with the team of 20 developers we have ) the only person on earth that wishes it, but as soon as the new Plone.org will be online, a lot of people will start needing such a feature. But having it in 2.6 will make it available as a standard in Plone/Zope world in… a few years.

In any case, most of them agree in the fact that this change is logical and that the current pypirc format is not to be kept. So I guess it is just a matter of time and patience.

This is the first post of the wrapups I want to do about the sprint that we had in Paris last week-end. We had a Bird of Feather about how people use eggs and zc.buildout in their projects, how they release and deploy them.

There were some people from Headnet (Anton, Mustapha) and Infrae (Kit, Sylvain) and Ingeniweb (Me), and we compared a bit how we are working with eggs, zc.buildout etc.

That is what I love in our community: companies can share their knowledge and grow up all together, technically speaking.

We all have internal recipes, command-line scripts, and are all relatively happy with zc.buildout. This discussion was very instructive.

From there, I thaught it would be a good idea to launch a new project in the community, on the top of zc.buildout (and maybe zc.sourcerelease), that would provide a common set of tools and deploying best practices, for people that works with the buildout, no matter which framework they use (Silva, Plone, etc.)

The first step for this project is to find the common needs and see if we can join forces to build common tools. To start it up, I decided to wrap up and release our internal set of tools into a single package called iw.releaser and publish it. This is the work I have done during the last months with the help of Gael, to help our team to work with zc.buildout in Plone Projects. It is Subversion dependent at this time.

I am expecting some feedback from Anton and Sylvain to see if we can make it a collective tool.

This package provides:

• a skeleton to build a project structure (buildout, packages; docs, etc.) so all projects have a standardized structure
• a ‘release’ distutils command that releases a package, upload it to the Cheeseshop or other servers, and send a shout out mail
• a set of command line tools, that can be used to deploy a buildout. These commands are doing many things besides launching a buildout building (which is a bit different from zc.sourcerelease)

This package is used at Ingeniweb for a few months now, and I tried to summarize how it is used in the docs. I bet a lot of bugs will be found if you try it, so consider this package as a non-mature package yet.

Join us all ! So you will be able to release and deploy your buildout-based apps with a few command-line calls,

We are working here at the Paris Sprint, and many things are going on. I wanted to do a quick wrapup before a longer and final wrapup.

Here’s all the tasks going on (I might miss some):

• Youenn and Cartsen are working on plone.recipe.apache, that will let you build and/or setup Apache in a buildout
• Michel presented a very interested talk yesterday on how insecure Plone can be (Man in the Middle attacks, etc), on the various existing solutions, and works on things to enhance it
• Maik leads a Funittest group, teaching the tool to people, and enhancing i
• Olivier and Christophe are working on Grok to learn it. Christophe worked yesterday on filling content to the new zope.org web site
• Matthew, Alex and I are working on PloneSoftwareCenter and plone.org, so the website can be ready to move to an egg-enabled Plone 3. wOOt !
• Gael, Jean-Francois (and Kai yesterday) are working on “Pimp my Buildbot“: configure and launch a complete buildbot system in a matter of minutes, using a simple buildout cfg file and running a simple command. I think this could be used for Plone repository and the collective as well ! The tool will be move to the collective at the end of the sprint.
• Gilles, Cyrille, and others (sorry, can’t keep up with all names), are working on iw.fss (FileSystemStorage for plone 3)
• Mustapha and Anton are making sweet things in ZopeSkel
• Anton worked also on finding the best way to do aysnhronous tasks in Plone
  
• There’s a big PloneGov team that is working on making the tool friendly with various government systems.
• Jean-Nicolas leads the work on kss/eventPush, so we all get a upload widget with live feedback (no flash inside ;))
• Godefroid and Lennart are Grok-ing as well;
• Christophe is preparing collective.kss.fly_guy, a tool that provides drag and drop in folder_contents
• Harito, Christian and Wim are making a sweet new theme for Plone: “Notre Dame“. The theme is kept quite generic, with all the plone tools/portlets designed in blue tones, kept in mind to be easy adjustable and changed to other color schemes. It will be a table-less egg for Plone 3.

More blogging tomorrow, I need to get back to my task

Since Plone 3 is out, integrators are affected by the new way to do themes and to manage page layout. Through The Web customization is reduce to the strict minimum and some of them just leave Plone to another thing more easier to integrate. Before the sprint there were three proof of concept products trying to modify this.

The only one that can be used is CSSManager developed by Weblion. It only allow the site manager to modify the base_properties through the PMI without having to type anything: have ave a picker color widget and dropdown menu for other properties. It works only if your theme use base_properties. For example NuPlone does not.

In Paris Sprint, Jean-Mathieu Grimaldi (macadames) create a new product to ameliorate plone skinning collective.phantasy that you can found here: http://svn.plone.org/svn/collective/collective.phantasy/trunk/

The main goal of this product is to be able to have theme associated with folders in the same way that you can see on Quintagroup skins site.

This is far from online theming that you can have here on wordpress or in CPSSkins.

What do dummies wnat to their site? Inline edting is cool, but they want to be able in few clicks to appropriate their brand new site adding a new logo and getting round corners everywhere. They want to get a theme and modify it quickly as we done with base_properties. They don’t want to see the ZMI or to learn python and Zope 3 interfaces.

Such a tool should be a component of the Plone social sprint and must be available with or within the next major version of Plone.

I’m leaving Plone Paris sprint with a lot to think. It was great to met you again guys and girl from the community.