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)

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