[Nix-dev] Plone Development on Nix is getting quite nice!

[Cillian de Róiste]

Hi,

Thanks to the work Rok Garbas has been doing on generating python packages
I noticed it is now possible to use a combination of Nix and a standard
buildout.cfg for Plone development with a small patch to buildout. I've
added instructions to the wiki for anyone who's interested:

https://nixos.org/wiki/Plone_development#How_to_use_myEnvFun_and_buildout-nix_to_create_a_plone_development_environment

Although this wouldn't be a suitable way to deploy Plone, as a development
environment it already provides many advantages over a plain old buildout
setup. You can re-use python modules which have already been packaged in
nix, which speeds up initial installation greatly (e.g. Python c modules
such as ZODB3 are already compiled). These can also effectively be shared
between multiple development environments, but, unlike a typical egg cache
they can be garbage collected when no longer needed. Since they are in the
store, you also know that they haven't been modified, however, if you do
want to modify an egg, you can replace the symlink in ./eggs with a copy of
the egg and add debugging statements there etc. There is also no need to
bootstrap buildout or set up a virtualenv, since buildout-nix is packaged
in nix and myEnvFun provides isolation. Required eggs which aren't
available in the environment will be downloaded and installed, and other
typical buildout development scripts should all work as normal.

I've only used this to install and run a vanilla Plone 4.3.1 instance so
far, so there may well be complications with more advanced configurations.
It would be interesting to hear if anyone else tries it out, or has any
feedback about it.

You'll notice some addition version pinnings in the buildout.cfg, I'm not
sure why they're required, but without them buildout failed with version
conflict errors.

Cheers,
Cillian
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