How to have a real site factory with buildout (Encolpe Degoute)
How to deploy tens of sites that are not really identical but share the same infrastructure.
You can use buildout to have repeatable installations. With ZopeSkel you can get a buildout configuration really easy, however. But this is for your team and not ready for production (hosting, load balancing, etc). You also want to be able to test everything with Jenkins.
To make it even easier to deploy more sites for e.g. large organisations they needed something more. Goals:
- To be able to switch applications in the same stack level
- Nginx vs Apache
- Squid vs Varnish
- Pound vs HAProxy
- May have profiles
- Manage known good sets for addons
This became zopeskel.unis. Important building blocks that are used:
extends+=(Do not mix “+=” and “=” because the latter one clears previous stuff)<=(it will copy the content before the interpretation)${:_buildout_section_name_}(gives you the name of the current section)
The buildout.cfg file is almost empty, it just extends a profile. Some folders
to manage configuration (e.g. profiles/etc, profiles/modules). There
are four working profiles: development, standalone, preproduction,
production. They are working on a profile for Jenkins.
In profiles/etc:
defines.cfg: password for supervisor, IP addresses, ports, etc.base.cfg: main buildout config shared by all profiles.project.cfg: all eggs specific for a project that you don’t want to add to an external profile.versions.cfg: the versions pins (and downloads) buildout should use.
In profiles/modules are configurations for e.g. LDAP, GetPaid,
theming (Diazo), ploneIDE. Make your modules as small as possible:
just the eggs that need to be added to [project-settings] and
version pins.
You can use zopeskel.unis as an example for your own setup.