The Über-Buildout Mark II – Windows (IIS) and Unix…
A multi-platform buildout for development and production deployment on Unix and Windows
Previously, I wrote about how to use a single buildout to manage the various aspects of a production server. That buildout, however, only works on Unix platforms. It builds nginx, varnish and haproxy, all of which are Unix-only (there is an nginx build for Windows, but it won’t work as an xdv XSLT proxy). For my current project, I also need to deploy to Windows Server 2003. And I need to support both production and development environments. Enter the Über-Buildout Mark II.
Update : I’ve used this setup in a few projects now. To make it easier to find and collaborate on, I’ve added it to the collective at http://svn.plone.org/svn/collective/buildout/uber You can export the version you want (with svn export , not svn co ) and use it as a starting point for your own build. Please also help keep the build up to date, and feel free to add new variants.
This buildout is spread across a number of files:
This project uses the xdv engine for theming. For development, we use dv.xdvserver , which applies the theme via a separately run server, configured in devel/server.ini. For production on Unix, we deploy a static XSLT file to nginx. On Windows, we use collective.xdv (not yet released – see collective svn for now) to apply the transform in-Plone. collective.xdv is used on Unix too, even if it’s not actually applying the transform, since it provides a way to declare which style sheets are to be rendered through the theme, via condition expressions in portal_css.
The buildout also sets up CacheFu, LDAP and ZODB blob support on Plone 3.3rc2.
The Unix production configuration is similar to the aforementioned blog post:
On Windows, the setup is currently:
The URLRewriter configuration and the Squid configuration file are both generated by the buildout, though the installation of Squid and configuration of the IIS site is a one-off activity that you have to do manually.
The various configuration files and a skeletal buildout may be downloaded here . It should work out of the box, and give you a pretty good idea about how to set all of this up for your own project. There is a brief README.txt with some more details.
On Windows, note in particular that you must start Squid using the generated squid.conf, and you must set up IIS according to the instructions, with the ‘theme’ directory as the web root and a wildcard mapping for the URLRewriter plugin. Don’t forget to disable «verify file exists» when you set up the wildcard mapping, and note that you need Microsoft .NET 2.0SP1 or later installed on the server.
If you do end up using this, consider contributing a more in-depth tutorial on this stuff to plone.org. I don’t have time to do it properly right now, but it would be a really good contribution.
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