Essential development tools (Kim Chee Leong)

(Last modified on )
#development #plone #ploneconf

Kim shows us a collection of tools that can be useful during development.

When you want to get started with Plone development, you need to know where to get help:

To get started with a buildout, theme or product, use ZopeSkel or Templer. Also check out the local commands these provide.

To speed up buildout, you can:

  • Use version 1.6+
  • Use allow-hosts to limit where buildout is looking
  • Use timeout -t 5.
  • Use -N so buildout doesn’t look for newer packages
  • Create a shared local buildout cache
  • Check out Ross Patterson’s blog post about buildout performance improvements.

Use mr.developer to check out the code of eggs in your buildout so you can easily develop on them. (And to update them all at once when you continue working on a later moment, use bin/develop up.)

The package sauna.reload picks up changes in the files of your packages and restart Zope automatically. But somehow Zope is restarted very quickly. For Plone 3 use plone.reload, which requires manual action to reload Python code or ZCML.

With collective.recipe.omelette it is easier to look into the code of Plone and third party addons.

plone.app.debugtoolbar shows debug information and it allows you to do stuff you normally need to do from the ZMI.

plone.app.themeing allows you to install a zip file with the theme (works with Diazo).

If a site is unresponsive, you can use mr.freeze to investigate. You can use it to print a stack trace for all threads so you can see what’s going on. Kim used to use Products.signalstack, but mr.freeze can do more, like drop Zope to a pdb debug prompt.

Use jarn.mkrelease or zest.releaser to release a package. It beats performing all the steps individually by hand.

Continuous integration with Travis CI for open source GitHub projects or Jenkins for internal company projects. Travis can be used for closed source projects but they don’t advertise with it and it’s quite expensive.

plone.api is still under development but already very useful!

products.pdbdebugmode allows for post-mortem debugging, but it can conflict with sauna.reload.

Finally: see collective.exampledevtools for more details.

View the slides or watch the video.