Buildout Basics

Overview of a buildout environment

A basic buildout consist of a single buildout.cfg configuration file, and a bootstrap.py which initialize the environment.

For a Plone buildout, we will usually have these directories generated in the buildout, alongside several others:

• bin/ - generated executable scripts will be stored here
• eggs/ - installed Python eggs will be stored here
• var/ - this is where all Plone data (ie: the database, logs, etc) will be stored

Initializing and building a buildout

A buildout can be initialized by executing boostrap.py with your selected version of Python. To avoid conflict with any libraries pre-installed with the Python environment, we recommend creating a clean separated Python environment using virtualenv before initializing a buildout.

Installing and initializing virtualenv:

easy_install-2.6 virtualenv
virtualenv -p /usr/bin/python2.6 /opt/python26/

Initializing buildout:

/opt/python26/bin/python boostrap.py

This will initialize the necessary scripts and directories needed to run a buildout.

Once a buildout is initialized, you can start the building process by running:

./bin/buildout -vvv

If the buildout ran successfully, you will get plenty of eggs installed in the eggs/ directory, and several scripts generated in bin/

Note

Sometimes bootstrap.py might fail due to it is outdated. If it is, download the latest bootstrap.py by running this command:

wget http://downloads.buildout.org/2/bootstrap.py -O bootstrap.py