Buildout

To increase the speed of the development process a buildout script is provided to properly initialize the project for anybody who wants to contribute to the project.

Buildout is a developer oriented tool designed for workings with Python eggs, so can be used for installing egg-based scripts for personal use.

One of the major force of buildout is that is repeatable, it should be possible to check-in a buildout specification and reproduce the same software later by checking out the specification and rebuilding.

Actually buildout is actively used for development and deployment.

VirtualEnv

First of all, please use virtualenv to protect your system, it’s not mandatory but handy.

What problem does virtualenv solve? If you like Python as I do, chances are you want to use it for other projects besides django-blog-zinnia. But the more projects you have, the more likely it is that you will be working with different versions of Python itself, or at least different versions of Python libraries. Let’s face it; quite often libraries break backwards compatibility, and it’s unlikely that any serious application will have zero dependencies.

So what do you do if two or more of your projects have conflicting dependencies? Virtualenv basically enables multiple side-by-side installations of Python, one for each project. It doesn’t actually install separate copies of Python, but it does provide a clever way to keep different project environments isolated.

So if you doesn’t already have virtualenv I suggest to you to type one of the following two commands:

$ sudo easy_install virtualenv

or even better:

$ sudo pip install virtualenv

Running the buildout

Before running the buildout script we will clone the main development repository of django-blog-zinnia, create a virtual Python environment to cloisonate the installation of the required librairies, then bootstrap the buildout script to finally execute it.

Follow these few command to start the development:

$ git clone git://github.com/Fantomas42/django-blog-zinnia.git
$ virtualenv --no-site-packages django-blog-zinnia
$ cd django-blog-zinnia
$ source ./bin/activate
$ python bootstrap.py
$ ./bin/buildout

The buildout script will resolve all the dependencies needed to develop the application and install some usefull scripts.

Once the buildout has rune, you are ready to hack the Zinnia project.

Development scripts

Use this command to launch the test suite:

$ ./bin/test

To view the code coverage run this command:

$ ./bin/cover

Execute these commands to check the code conventions:

$ ./bin/pyflakes zinnia
$ ./bin/pep8 --count -r --exclude=tests.py,migrations zinnia

For building the HTML documentation run this simple command:

$ ./bin/docs

Demo project

A demo project using Zinnia, is available once the buildout script has run. The demo project is usefull when you want to do functionnal testing.

To launch the demo site, execute these commands:

$ ./bin/demo syncdb
$ ./bin/demo runserver

To directly have entries in your demo, run this command:

$ ./bin/demo loaddata helloworld

Pretty easy no ?

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