ptools / instancemanager
Armin Stross-Radschinski
- Real-World Product-Developer / Industrial-Designer
- Using IT-based information architectures since 30 Years
- Implementing the missing tools with Rapid-Development
- Using Zope and Plone since the year 2002
What are ptools/instancemanager intended for?
- Install a site management infrastructure
- (re)Install & do maintenance of classic Zope 2 instances including documentation
- Start from scratch by kickstarting from almost any existing python installation.
- Download, build and install Zope, Plone and dependencies (i.E. PIL, command-line tools, libraries)
Features
- Install into non administrative user-accounts of a UNIXish System (Linux, MacOSX etc.)
- Easy reinstall of the same environment on a different OS
- Setup a basic product repository to provide add-on products from different physical sources
- Archives (tar, tgz, zip)
- Archive-bundles (including droplists to omit parts of the bundle)
- Filesystem Products (SVN)
- Archives (tar, tgz, zip)
Setup and manage instances
Define and run frequent repetitive tasks in a documented way
- Product install, reinstall
- Basic ZEO-Setup
- backup, restore
- syncing of development and live sites
- testing with provided basic content
- fire up "GenericSetup"
Productivity gains (site management)
- Sharing understanding of the site-environment between product managers
- Separating access for different projects on the same server
- Simplify running complex tasks on multiple instances with one multi-action
- start / stop
- backup
- update products (pre-production testing, dry-run)
Productivity gains (development)
- Conditional load of products depending on "development-flags"
- Quickly test migrations with fresh sample databases
- Simply create a clone of a instance for development
Tutorial
Start with ptools
- If not already existing – create a user-account for your new Zope environment
- Checkout ptools into a new directory ptools
- Determine your recommended combination of Python/Zope
- run the preppyzo.py command with the necessary options
- sit back and enjoy
Setup the Instance Manager tool
- Install the egg
- Edit a copy of the default configuration file
- add the config file to SVN ready for roll-out
- svn up on the production instance
- instancemanager update site.com
Instance Manager Options
Potential
- UI-concepts for selecting tested configurations and adding Products into known configurations
- zc.buildout only basic logging & no management feature concepts at the moment
- Migrating the concepts into the zc.buildout way of installing in the future
- Get Instance manager 1.0 (Release candidate) at:
http://plone.org/products/instance-manager - ptools is not yet in the collective and suggested to be replaced with zc.buildout in the future