Getting to Know Zope 3: Round 1

While I've done quite a bit of Python over the past few years, I've not really used any of the Zope based technologies. With the exception of zope.interface and a Plone proof of concept, I'm new to most everything Zope.

I've elected to go with pure play Zope as opposed to Grok. I like what I see from the Grok project, but I like to understand all of the internals. I get the impression that Grok attempts to shield that from me.

One of the things that I've been looking forward to in my quest to learn Zope 3 has been the egg-based install process. Over the past few months, I've been contemplating moving our RPM based system over to Python eggs. We can dynamically download and install them via HTTP when our application server  starts up... or something all cutting edge and automated like that.

Getting it Up And Running

It took me a bit to actually figure out *how* to download an egg-based Zope installation. The links off of the main web site still point to the monolithic tarball distribution. It took a bit of creative clicking to find the Zope 3 site, which is Wiki based. Even then, the majority of the articles on that site are geared towards earlier releases of Zope 3.

Then I found this: http://wiki.zope.org/zope3/Zope340c1. The release documentation for Zope 3.4, release candidate 1. Not exactly the official style I was looking for, but it points me in the  right direction regardless.

Note that I opted to install the latest version of Python 2.4. My first attempt was with 2.5.1, but that ended with a  mysterious "no module named script.command." I've done all of this with 2.4.5.

1. First, we'll install the 'zopeproject' utility via setuptools. There are a few dependancies that area also added when this runs: PasteScript, PasteDeploy, and Paste.

root@marvin jj]# /usr/local/bin/easy_install zopeproject
Searching for zopeproject
Reading http://pypi.python.org/simple/zopeproject/
Best match: zopeproject 0.4.1
Downloading http://pypi.python.org/packages/2.4/z/zopeproject/zopeproject-0.4.1-py2.4.egg#md5=3c0c590752c637ee047cc555b2e8f5c1
Processing zopeproject-0.4.1-py2.4.egg
creating /usr/local/lib/python2.4/site-packages/zopeproject-0.4.1-py2.4.egg
Extracting zopeproject-0.4.1-py2.4.egg to /usr/local/lib/python2.4/site-packages
Adding zopeproject 0.4.1 to easy-install.pth file
Installing zopeproject script to /usr/local/bin

... Paste, PasteScript, and PasteDeploy ...
Finished processing dependencies for zopeproject

Easy enough. As this all relies on zc.buildout, I should be able to drop root permissions now and install directly into my home directory.

2. Next, run the newly installed zopeproject utility in order to create a Zope install. It asks a few questions specific to the install and then goes about it's business downloading all of the eggs that do not already exist on my system. As this is a new install, there are exactly zero pre existing. This takes a while. Note that it does allow one to pass a shared egg directory. This is a plus in that multiple instances can share the  same install base.

jeff@marvin code]$ /usr/local/bin/zopeproject test_project
Enter user (Name of an initial administrator user): jeff
Enter passwd (Password for the initial administrator user): password
Enter eggs_dir (Location where zc.buildout will look for and place packages) ['/home/jeff/buildout-eggs']:
Creating directory ./test_project
Downloading zc.buildout...
Invoking zc.buildout...
zip_safe flag not set; analyzing archive contents...
warning: no files found matching '0.1.0-changes.txt'
no previously-included directories found matching 'docs-in-progress'
"optparse" module already present; ignoring extras/optparse.py.
"textwrap" module already present; ignoring extras/textwrap.py.
zip_safe flag not set; analyzing archive contents...
docutils.writers.html4css1.__init__: module references __file__
docutils.writers.pep_html.__init__: module references __file__
docutils.writers.s5_html.__init__: module references __file__
docutils.writers.newlatex2e.__init__: module references __file__
docutils.parsers.rst.directives.misc: module references __file__
[jeff@marvin code]$

At this point, there's not a lot of knowledge of paster or buildout required. I intend to learn them, but for now, it's rather easy to get started. Also of note, there's a holy hell of a lot less warning output using 2.4 as opposed to 2.5!

3. Lastly, If this works as expected, it should be possible to simply step into the newly created instance  directory and startup the server.

[jeff@marvin test_project]$ bin/test_project-ctl fg
bin/paster serve deploy.ini
------
2008-04-24T21:14:38 WARNING root Developer mode is enabled: this is a security risk and should NOT be enabled on production servers. Developer mode can be turned off in etc/zope.conf
/home/jeff/buildout-eggs/zope.configuration-3.4.0-py2.4.egg/zope/configuration/config.py:197: DeprecationWarning: ZopeSecurityPolicy is deprecated. It has moved to zope.securitypolicy.zopepolicy  This reference will be removed somedays
 obj = getattr(mod, oname)
Starting server in PID 16295.
------
2008-04-24T21:14:41 INFO paste.httpserver.ThreadPool Cannot use kill_thread_limit as ctypes/killthread is not available
serving on http://127.0.0.1:8080

Perfect! We've an instance of Zope running and the ZMI is accessible. When time permits, I'll step through the instance directory and get a good understanding of what was actually created. It's pretty straightforward now that we've got an instance up.