Run Plone off CD-Rom

by Roger Erens — last modified Dec 30, 2008 03:01 PM

Put Zope and Plone on a live CD-ROM for demonstration purposes

The instructions given on Jens Vagelpohl's How To describes how to create a "Demo" Zope installation. It appears to be a little outdated as it targets Zope 2.1.2/3/4 and 2.3.x.

Sebastien Georget has published instructions for Zope 2.7. You should follow his outline if you have installed Plone as a product into Zope.

This How-to takes their instructions a tiny bit further to a plain Plone 2.0.3 installation as obtained by using the installer for Windows XP. Take note that you need at least to gloss over the abovementioned instructions. Also note that sessioning functionality cannot be supported on a read-only medium.

zope.conf

The default configuration file must be modified to be system-independent.

The file in question was C:\Program Files\Plone 2\Data\etc\zope.conf

Remove the drive letters and \Program Files prefix:

   %define INSTANCE C:\Program Files\Plone 2\Data
   %define ZOPE C:\Program Files\Plone 2\Zope

  becomes:

   %define INSTANCE \Plone 2\Data
   %define ZOPE \Plone 2\Zope

Cause ZODB to be opened in read-only mode so no information is written to the CD-Rom:
```
  read-only-database on
```
Inhibit the creation of log files and pid files:
```
  zserver-read-only-mode on
```

Disable the "event" logger and "access" logger:

   <eventlog>
   ...
   </eventlog>

  becomes:

   #<eventlog>
   # ...
   #</eventlog>

Undo the definition of the temporary zodb-db used for sessioning:

   <zodb_db temporary>
    ...
   </zodb_db>

  becomes:

   #<zodb_db temporary> 
   # ...
   #</zodb_db>

runzope.bat

The batch file that defines environment variables and issues the start up command needs changes, too.

The file involved was C:\Program Files\Plone 2\Data\bin\runzope.bat

The changes constitute of simply stripping the leading C:\Program Files from the definitions of

PYTHON
ZOPE_HOME
INSTANCE_HOME
SOFTWARE_HOME
CONFIG_FILE

Finally

Burn the CD-Rom with Plone 2 as the root folder.

Watch out for Windows 98

I used Roxio to burn the CD-Rom and got a warning about having a very deep sub-folder level, which I ignored. Doubleclicking the file \Plone 2\Data\bin\runzope.bat gave me an accessible Plone site on Windows XP. However, on Windows 98 I got errors regarding "Not enough environment space available". Plone did get started on that system by typing in the environment variables definitions and command after a DOS-prompt.

Demo storage

Note that Zope 2.7 has a demo storage for this purpose. It can mount a file storage, but lives in memory. It was designed for use cases like live CD-Roms intended for demonstration purposes. You can publish and edit documents, but they'll disappear when you stop the Plone site.

Serving static files off the CD

If you have other content on the CD that you also want to make available through Plone, look at products such as ExternalStorage or LocalFS.

Warning