Handy zope instance manager (updated)¶

I just release a first version of my instance manager that I started with two days ago (update 15 May: new .tgz, it lacked the skeleton directory). I'm used to having scripts that extract all the needed products for a zope instance, that restart zope and that call a script that quickinstalls the products. Both for development and on the customer server .

The developer-side scripts (bash) improved with every product, but it was hard to merge the improvements back into previous projects. And it was a lot of work to set up all the files for a new project. And it didn't fit everyone's location preferences.

So I made a seperate python program that does all this in a much more configurable way. The old scripts only allowed .tgz files as sources, the new "instancemanager" also allows symlinked sources (like for instance a plone 2.5 svn bundle checkout). Some of the things it does:

• Creation of a zope instance. Including setting debug mode on, verbose security on, security=python, port number, username, password. In a location that you specify (default is in ~/instances/projectname).
• Making the products available in Products/. They can come from .tgz (also bundles) and from symlinked locations (also bundles). This assumes that you have your svn checkouts somewhere on your filesystem (~/svn/* by default) and not inside the Products directory. Might be something for a later version.
• Copying, if available, of a prepared Data.fs for your project. You can keep the latest customer database stored away somewhere on your filesystem and it'll get copied to your instance whenever you do a fresh install.
• Starting/stopping/restarting zope.
• Possibly calling a script (in the zope root) that does some quickinstall calls to your plone folder and reinstalls your products. You need to prepare this script yourself, though.
• There are two combined actions: "fresh" and "soft". "Soft" just restarts zope and calls the reinstall script, "fresh" also cleans out and rebuilds your product directory, copies a fresh database, starts zope and calls the reinstall script. Real handy to get a quick clean zope instance to test with.

I'm using it myself already for my projects. What makes it handy is that I only need to edit one config file to get a new instance with just the right software. Handy for testing ploneformmailer in multiple zope/plone combinations, for instance!

Feedback welcome, especially also on setting it up. It has a distutils setup.py, so that's handy. The README.txt is reasonably OK. Running it once gives you a config directory .instancemanager in your homedir with a userdefaults.py full of customisable locations - and with good documentation about every one of them.