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Instancemanager usage manual

Usage manual, mostly generated from the code. So don't edit it here, but edit and document the sourcecode.

1. Introduction

General idea behind the product and a high-level overview.

Quick intro

Install as described in INSTALL.txt
Run instancemanager once to create a .instancemanager directory in ~
Edit userdefaults.py in ~ for only the common basis for all your sites (example, Zope path, default admin and password for new sites)
Copy userdefaults.py in ~ to <project>.py (typically "customername.py") and customize (override) for that project (port, plone site name, products, etc.)
Now this will do the full setup for your site. ONLY do it when you want a TOTALLY fresh start:
```
instancemanager fresh <project>    # NOT <project>.py - 
```
to stop zope:
```
instancemanager -z stop <project> 
```
to start in foreground:
```
instancemanager -z fg <project> 
```
to reinstall products:
```
instancemanager --products <project> 
```
or, if you want to make sure everything's OK:
```
instancemanager --products --manifest <project> 
```
The last gets you a (wide) manifest that can help diagnose product version issues and collisions from bundles.

More details below.

Setting up a zope instance, symlinking to all the products, extracting product tarballs, copying over a snapshot Data.fs from the customer's website, restarting zope, clicking around in the quickinstaller: it can all be done by hand.

Instancemanager is a handy utility program that manages your development zope instances:

Creates clean, fresh instances in your standard location.
Copies over a prepared Data.fs if desired.
Makes products available in the 'Products/' directory from a variety of sources (.tgz, .tgz bundles, svn, symlinking).
Restarts your zope and reinstalls your products.
Does the Data.fs copy, the product availability and the reinstall in one step, giving you a real fresh instance without leftover junk.
Make backups and restores of the instance database to a directory. By default backups are stored in ~/backups/<project> which will be created if it doesn't exist. You can also set how many full backup you want to keep. Older backups will automatically be deleted to reduce disk usage.

If you're the kind of good developers that's also a lazy developer, you don't want to do this repetitive stuff by hand. That's where the instance manager jumps in. 'instancemanager --create yourproject' creates an instance in your default location. 'instancemanager fresh yourproject ' gives you a freshly prepared products directory, a freshly copied pre-made Data.fs (if you've got one) and it presses the quickinstaller buttons you want pressed.

For instance, individual product sources can be:

A '.tgz' file (like FCKeditor or qGoogleSitemaps).
A '.tgz' bundle (like plone or ploneformmailer).
A symlink (most probably to an svn directory, for instance your current customer development product).
A symlink to a bundle directory (most probably an svn bundle, for instance the latest plone 2.5).

Configuration is handled in a layered manner. Instancemanager has its own defaults. You can overwrite these global defaults locally ("I always store my instances in my homedir instead of '~/instances/'"). And there's an per-project config file where you can list exceptions. And of course the passwords and desired products and so.

If you specify the ID of your plone root ('plone_site_name'), the instancemanager attempts a quick-reinstall of your products when running the "fresh" or "soft" targets. Real handy during development. It even migrates plone to a newer version when needed. I'm able to migrate http://vanrees.org/ from a plone 2.1 website to plone 2.5, including migration, with just a call to 'instancemanager fresh vanrees '. And it updates a couple of other products too, while it's at it. This removes the need for much by-hand action when testing migrations or when doing installer updates on your product.

When you have specified a plone_site_name and a PloneSite of that name does not exist yet, instancemanager tries to create that. Works for plone 2.1 and 2.5. It has some oddities still though. When the script has run for the first time, a 'bin/zopectl status' cannot find the zope process, though it is running. Shutting it down via the Control Panel and then restarting it from the command line seems the best option here. Some testing is needed to improve this. Upon trying again after minor changes it seems to work fine actually. Still: consider this experimental, so: start experimenting. :)

Usage

Usage:

Usage: instancemanager [options] [multi-action] <project>
multi-action: default ones are 'fresh' and 'soft'.

options:
  --version             show program's version number and exit
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -v, --verbose         Show all logging messages.
  -q, --quiet           Only show error messages.
  -m, --manifest        Print Manifest of installed Products and collisions
  --activate            Print workingenv activation command
  -b, --backup          Backup the instance database (incremental backup).
  --changeown           Action that changes ownership of some documents.
  --copydatafs          Copy over a fresh, prepared, 'Data.fs'.
  --create              Create a zope instance for your project.
  --pack                Action that packs your database.
  --printconfig         Print the configuration for this project.
  --products            Rebuild the Products/ directory .
  -r, --reinstall       Action that quickreinstalls your products.
  --repozo=REPOZO       Other backup/restore tasks with repozo.
  --restore             Restore the database from the regular backup.
  --restore-date=DATE   Restore situation at DATE from regular backup.
  --rewriterule         Print out an apache rewriterule.
  --runcommand          Run external command.
  -t PRD, --test=PRD    Runs tests for product PRD (use MAIN for main
                        products).
  -u CMD, --uninstall=CMD
                        Action that uninstalls a given product
  --updatesources       Update the working-copies of all sources.
  --upgradezope         Update the zope.conf used for your instance
  --zeo=CMD             Runs your zeo server's 'bin/zeoctl CMD'.
  -z CMD, --zope=CMD    Runs your instance's 'bin/zopectl CMD'.

2. Installing

How to install the instancemanager and how to do the initial setup.

Instancemanager can be installed using the normal python setup.py install magic. Note that (at least on my computer), the actual instancemanager script gets installed somewhere deep in the python library directory instead of in a normal executable place. To remedy that, do something like:

sudo python setup.py install --install-script=/usr/local/bin

The first time you run instancemanager (just type instancemanager and press Enter), it creates a .instancemanager directory in your home directory. There you'll find a userdefaults.py that you can customise to your local needs.

Following that, create a file called <yourproject>.py (can be empty) in the .instancemanager/ directory, customising that perhaps with project-specific settings (just copy the few items that you want to change from userdefaults.py). Then you're set for typing in instancemanager --create yourproject. Or perhaps even handier, instancemanager yourproject fresh, as that does everything from creating the instance to installing your products.

Instancemanager creates an instancemanager.log logfile in ~/.instancemanager/, btw, should you want to get an information overload about what's going on. (The first time you run it, it creates the logfile in the current directory as ~/.instancemanager doesn't exist yet).

If you want the bash shell to complete your instancemanager commands, read the instruction on the top of the bash_completion file.

3. Available actions

Not-detailed-yet description of all available actions. This is generated from the source code, so don't edit it here.

Actions that can be performed on instances and products.

Everything that is handy to have as a single unit of action is turned into an Action. They can be quite small (just stopping zope), but that's OK. Being able to say 'instancemanager myproject stop' from anywhere without having to go to the instance directory to say 'bin/zopectl stop' saves on the number of terminals you have to keep open.

--activate

Print workingenv's activate script.

The activate script needs to be run with . PATH/bin/activate or source PATH/bin/activate. All we can do to make it simpler is to just print the output of activate so that a source instancemanager PROJECT --activate does the same

--backup

Backup the Zope Database of the instance.

This action relies on the backup_basedir_template variable to store the backups. By default, the backups are incremental unless there's been a pack.

--changeown

Action that changes ownership of some documents.

--copydatafs

Copy over a fresh, prepared, Data.fs.

When you are developing, you might have an existing Data.fs file you want to use. For instance the current product database of your customer project that you copied for debugging purposes.

Instancemanager looks for a database in, by default, '~/instances/datafs/yourproject.fs'. You can change this in your config. The datafs action just copies this file to the instance's 'var/' directory.

--create

Create a zope instance, possibly including a zeo server.

This will create a zope instance for you using the familiar 'mkzopeinstance' command. The instance will be the location you specified in your config file. By default it will be '~/instances/projectname/'.

Also, the zope.conf will be adapted in some places, like enabling debug mode and verbose security (for zope 2.8 and up). The port, username and password will be set according to the config file.

--ipython

Start ipython.

--pack

Action that packs your database.

--printconfig

Print the configuration.

'instancemanager yourproject printconfig' shows the configuration for your project as intancemanager understands it.

--products

Rebuild the Products/ directory from scratch.

Warning, this does remove everything in 'Products/' before copying over new versions. That is the whole purpose. :-) If it isn't your purpose, you shouldn't really be using this program.

You can configure a variety of sources in your configuration. Every source is an instruction for the "products" action. Possible sources are svn links and .tgz files, both for single products or for bundles.

--reinstall

Action that quickreinstalls your products.

This used to depend on the presence of a specific script in your zope root that called the actual quickinstaller. There's a generic script that gets used now, however.

For more info see the quickinstallerscript documentation.

--repozo

Perform a variety of repozo backup/restore actions.

--backup and --restore are fine, but there are more diverse things that can be done with repozo, this action allows some of them.

--restore

Restore the Zope Database of the instance.

This action relies on the backup_basedir_template variable to restore the backups from.

--restore-date

Restore the Zope Database of the instance by date

This action relies on the backup_basedir_template variable to restore the backups from.

--rewriterule

Print out a RewriteRule for use in your apache config.

Also include some helpful pointers to information.

--runcommand

Run external command action

This action calls external script using os.system call Script is called for all instanceDirs.

--test

Action for calling zopectl with a test command.

--uninstall

Action that uninstalls a given product from your instance.

--updatesources

Action for updating/switching svn checkouts

--upgradezope

Copies over the zope.conf or regenerates it based on the current

configuration and copies over the zopectl from the correct skeleton. Upgrade your instance in 2 steps:

Update the Zope version in your project.py
run instancemanager --upgradezope

--zeo

Action for calling zeoctl.

--zope

Action for calling zopectl.

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