Installation options

The Unified Installer is versatile, and may be used to prepare Plone for use in configurations ranging from a production-ready, load-balanced cluster to a testing and development installation in a user home directory. As the latter requires no special privileges, and is easiest to understand, we'll cover it in this chapter. However, you should know that you can also use the installer for more advanced installations. The installer's README.txt documents the advanced options.

Preparing your system

A few common development tools are required to use the Unified Installer. These may already be installed on your system, but if you've never built packages from source before, you may need to do some preparatory tool installation. In particular, you will need the GNU tools: GCC (GNU Compiler Collection ), G++ (GNU C++), and make.

The simplest and quickest way to see if you already have these tools installed is to open a terminal window (or use SSH to open a remote shell, if it's not your workstation), and just try to run the commands gcc, g++, and make:

steve@ubuntu:~$ gcc
gcc: no input files
steve@ubuntu:~$ g++
g++: no input files
steve@ubuntu:~$ make
make: *** No targets specified and no makefile found. Stop.

If you receive a command not found response to any of these commands, use your platform's package manager to install the appropriate package. If you don't have root access on the install target, you'll need to contact your system administrator and ask them to install these common tools.

Downloading and unpacking the Unified Installer

Open a web browser and visit http://plone.org/products/plone. Copy the link location for Get Plone for Linux/BSD/Unix. Open a shell session on the installation target computer and download the Unified Installer to your home directory.wget is a handy tool for this.

steve@ubuntu:~$ wget http://plone.googlecode.com/files/Plone-3.1.0-
 UnifiedInstaller.tar.gz
...
09:57:51 (294.24 KB/s) - `Plone-3.1.6-UnifiedInstaller.tar.gz' saved [25236282/25236282]

Note the tar.gz filename extension of the file that you just downloaded. This is sometimes written .tgz and indicates a gzip compressed tar archive, sometimes called a tarball.

Now, unpack the archive by using the tar utility:

steve@ubuntu:~$ tar zxf Plone-3.1.6-UnifiedInstaller.tar.gz

Substitute the name of the installer that you have downloaded. Filenames will vary with Plone and installer versions.

This will create a Plone-3.1.6-UnifiedInstaller directory (the name will vary with the Plone version). In it, you should find a README.txt document, along with an install.sh script and package, and script subdirectories. It's always a good idea to take a moment to review the README.txt file.

Running the Unified Installer

Change your current directory to the newly-created installer directory:

steve@ubuntu:~$ cd Plone-3.1.6-UnifiedInstaller/

You're now ready to run the Unified Installer's install.sh script. Use the standalone command-line option to indicate that you want to create a simple Zope/Plone install:

steve@ubuntu:~/Plone-3.1.6-UnifiedInstaller$ ./install.sh standalone
Stand-Alone Zope Instance selected
Rootless install method chosen. Will install for use by system user steve
...
Installing Plone 3.1.6 at /home/steve/Plone-3.1
...

Now, sit back and watch the console messages stream by. The install script does a lot of work. In sequence, it will perform source installations of the following:

The install script may also install local copies of zlib (compression) and libjpeg (photographic image manipulation) libraries if you don't have development versions of these on the computer already. It will also initialize a Zope object database and create a Plone web site inside it.

Don't worry about the messages flying by. If any part of the install fails, the install script will stop and display an error message. When the process is complete, you can expect to see a concluding message containing an administrative password, start and stop instructions, and the success message:

...
Plone successfully installed at /home/steve/Plone-3.1
See /home/steve/Plone-3.1/zinstance/README.txt for startup instructions

Make note of the administrative user name and password, then read the README.txt file in the zinstance directory for start and stop instructions. If you need to check your password again, you'll find it recorded in the adminPassword.txt file in the zinstance directory.

Starting and stopping Plone

You can now start Zope and Plone with the command line:

$HOME/Plone-3.1/zinstance/bin/plonectl start

Substitute the directory created by your installation for Plone-3.1; this will vary with Plone versions. $HOME is just shorthand for your home directory. A successful start will display a message like this:

. daemon process started, pid=15054

Where pid is the identifier for the process.

This starts Zope and Plone running in the background, detached from your shell session. You may close the Window or switch to some other work. Plone should keep running until you take action to stop it, or shut your computer down.

To check if Plone is running, use the command:

$HOME/Plone-3.1/zinstance/bin/plonectl status

And, to stop it, use the command:

$HOME/Plone-3.1/zinstance/bin/plonectl stop

In all of these cases, what you're actually starting and stopping is the Zope web application server. Plone is an application installed to run on Zope.

You may also find it very useful to be able to start Zope/Plone in foreground mode. In this mode, Zope will run in debug mode and will print diagnostic messages to the terminal window. You will not be able to run other programs in this shell session until you stop Zope, and if you close the terminal window, you will shut down Zope.

$HOME/Plone-3.1/zinstance/bin/instance fg

The installation layout

The installation process created a directory with a name such as Plone-3.1 in your home directory. This directory contains the Python and Zope builds and a zinstance directory that contains the configuration files, the object database, and a few utilities. zinstance is often referred to as your Plone instance directory.

Installation options

We briefly mentioned previously that the Unified Installer may be used to create different types of Plone installations. In particular:

Both of these options are a good idea if your goal is a secure, robust install for a production server. Both add unnecessary complications, though, if you're only after a test or development installation.