Buildout II: Getting Ready for Deployment#

Todo

Installation without buildout

The Starzel buildout#

Have a look at the buildout some of the trainers use for their projects: starzel/buildout

It has some notable features:

  • It extends to config- and version-files on github shared by all projects that use the same version of Plone:

    [buildout]
extends =
    https://raw.githubusercontent.com/starzel/buildout/5.1.2/linkto/base.cfg

  • It allows to update a project simply by changing the version it extends.

  • It allows to update all projects of one version by changing remote files (very useful for HotFixes).

  • It is minimal work to setup a new project.

  • It has presets for development, testing, staging and production.

  • It has all the nice development-helpers we use.

Another noteable buildout to look for inspiration:

A deployment setup#

A 'normal' deployment setup could look like this:

ZEO-Server   ->   ZEO-Server (ZRS)

   / | \

ZEO Clients (as many as you want)

   \ | /

Load balancer (nginx or haproxy)

     |

   Cache (varnish)

     |

Webserver (nginx)

Deploying Plone and production-setups are outside the scope for this training.

See also

Other tools we use#

There are plenty of tools that make developing and managing sites much easier. Here are only some of the ones you might want to check out:

  • Fabric (managing sites)

  • Sentry (error monitoring)

  • Ansible (managing and provisioning machines)

  • Greylog, ELK (logging)

  • Nagios, Zabbix (server monitoring)

  • jenkins, gitlab-ci, travis, drone.io (Continuous Integration)

  • piwik (statistics)

  • gitlab (code repository and code review)

  • redmine, taiga, assembla (project-management and ticket-system)