Technical

Automatically pack your Plone instances (without zeo)

At Affinitic, we have many Plone sites on our servers and we wanted to pack their ZODB automatically.

Our goal is of course to do it without any downtime. It’s easy when you have a zeoserver, but you cannot use a packing script when there isn’t :

zc.lockfile.LockError: Couldn't lock 'instance/var/filestorage/Data.fs.lock'

We decided to simply do a wget on the ZMI packing form.
Here is the command to pack your main database (7 days) :

wget --max-redirect 0 --post-data='submit=Pack&days:float=7.0' http://user:password@localhost:8080/Control_Panel/Database/main/manage_pack

We wrapped this in a script to get meaningful exit code and this is deployed via Puppet to have a cron for each and every Plone instances. Even the user that is used to access the instance is created via Puppet with :

bin/instance adduser user password

Alternative method, not used for deployment reasons and using a Python script : https://www.nathanvangheem.com/news/automatically-pack-the-zodb

If it can help anyone …

Beware of uppercase letters in your config files

We got a surprise using a [theme:parameters] variable in the manifest.cfg of one of our Diazo theme.

We were defining a parameter like that :

isFrontPage = context/@@isFrontPage

and then we were using it in the rules :

<drop css:content="#footer-sitemap" if="$isFrontPage" />

But we got an error after having the Theme installed. And we found that the parameter we got in Theme control panel was “isfrontpage” and not “isFrontPage” so the “isFrontPage” parameter used in rules was undefined !

This is happening because plone.app.theming (as plone.resource, Products.GenericSetup, …) is using python’s ConfigParser to parse the manifest.cfg file (“from ConfigParser import ConfigParser“) and it does a lower() on the sections and variables that you put in your config files.

This is the same for RawConfigParser and SafeConfigParser.

So … don’t ever use camelcase there ;-)

 

Google Chrome + Firebug Lite + z3c.form = Bad combo

There is a bug that provokes a double execution of the Update method of z3c.form when you launch Firebug Lite in Google Chrome. Be careful when you are developping in that environment.

I guess that firebug lite triggers an undesirable event.

Remove broken portlets programmatically

If you have specific broken portlets that needs to be removed from your Plone site, you will have to reinstall the product that contains your portlets, otherwise you will get this error :

Traceback (innermost last):
Module ZPublisher.Publish, line 126, in publish
Module ZPublisher.mapply, line 77, in mapply
Module ZPublisher.Publish, line 46, in call_object
Module plone.app.portlets.browser.kss, line 66, in delete_portlet
Module zope.container.ordered, line 243, in __delitem__
Module zope.container.contained, line 647, in uncontained
Module OFS.Uninstalled, line 45, in __getattr__
AttributeError: __parent__

But what if you just can’t find / reinstall the product ?

You could already remove the broken portlet through Plone UI, thanks to packages like collective.braveportletsmanager. Now you will be able to do it without any additional package thanks to this change in plone.app.portlet.

If you want to delete broken portlets programmatically, this is possible by disabling the error raised before your usual portlet removal function (see fixing_up in zope.container.contained) :

from zope.container import contained
contained.fixing_up = True
manager = getUtility(IPortletManager, name=u'plone.leftcolumn', context=portal)
assignments = getMultiAdapter((portal, manager), IPortletAssignmentMapping)
for portlet in assignments:
    del assignments[portlet]
contained.fixing_up = False

We used this in a migration step for a customer.
Enjoy !

Filter menu using a grok view

You want a menu to be seen only in certain conditions without creating a new “permission” stuff. You can use the filter attribute in your menuItem. You can access the request and context in it.

Simple example:

<menuItem
    for="*"
    title="My dinosaur menu"
    description=""
    permission="zope.Public"
    action="@@mydinosaurpage"
    menu="mainmenu"
    filter="context/@@displayForDinosaursOnly"/>

Now we have to create a view that will be called by the filter attribute, the only working way I found was using a grok view (e.g. menufilter.py):

from five import grok
from Products.CMFCore.utils import getToolByName

from zope.interface import Interface

class DisplayForDinosaursOnly(grok.View):
    """
    Menu using that class as filter will be displayed
        for Dinosaurs roles
    """
    grok.context(Interface)
    grok.name('displayForDinosaursOnly')

    def render(self):
        pm = getToolByName(self.context, 'portal_membership')
        roles = pm.getAuthenticatedMember().getRoles()
        return 'Dinosaur' in roles

And finally register your grok view:

<grok:grok package="my.package.ns.menufilter" />

And voilà! Your dinosaur menu will only be seen by dinosaurs, the filter is working.

Python verbose in zope and scripts

To set python verbose, you can simply use -v option.

python -v foo.py

But how to do it in zope environment? This does not work:

bin/instance fg -v

So to make it work, just edit the first line in executable script, example in bin/instance

#!/home/user/buildout/foo.package/bin/python -v

Of course works with other scripts like bin/test, etc…

Now you can get more debug info when needed!

Zope – how long does it take to serve a request?

For the moment only a reverse proxy (apache, ngnix) or a browser can show you how long a request took to be processed.

For monitoring or debugging purpose you might want to know what zope instance is slow.

The default access zope log file give you such a log format:

127.0.0.1 - Anonymous [27/Oct/2010:16:44:04 +0100] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 1957 "" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; fr; rv:1.9.2.11) Gecko/20101013 Ubuntu/10.10 (maverick) Firefox/3.6.11"

which doesn’t give you any information about how fast zope was to serve that request.

At the moment there is no way to add this number of seconds in the log format of zope 2. Unfortunately the zope http server (ZServer & medusa) cannot be easily overridden or monkey patched.

Here is a patch to apply on your zope 2 buildout to have such a log format:

127.0.0.1 0.008843 - Anonymous [27/Oct/2010:16:45:41 +0100] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 1957 "" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; fr; rv:1.9.2.11) Gecko/20101013 Ubuntu/10.10 (maverick) Firefox/3.6.11"

You see here that it took 0.008843 seconds to compute the page on that zope instance.

Thanks to this number of seconds we have monitoring checks (using Nagios 3) and monitoring graph (using Cacti) of each instances within our zeo’s.

Patch for Zope 2.10

Patch for Zope 2.12

To apply the patch, install omelette in your buildout and run this command in the root of your buildout:

patch -p0 < responsetime-212.diff

It will patch the required methods in ZServer to give you the number of seconds the request took to be processed. A patch might sound (and is) hacky but that’s the easiest way to change such a low level module.

Maybe we should give the possiblility to have this in log format in Zope 2.1 / 2.13 default config ?

OpenOffice with buildouts

Easy install the pyuno library with buildout

This recipe was started by Infrae, I have added the pyuno egg creation within the recipe. It is so nice to be able to share code so easily !

Download OpenOffice in a buildout might sound odd but

  • You got used (and I think you are right) to isolate your python environment for each projects (e.g using buildout & virtualenv)
  • You want to control OpenOffice components with your favourite python using the official OpenOffice library: pyuno
  • If you already installed OpenOffice, you might not see how to link your favourite python with the pyuno library provided by the OpenOffice package of your favourite distribution

The python uno library (aka pyuno) is only delivered with OpenOffice. The library provides access to all OpenOffice UNO api which means:

  • read and write doc, odt, rdf, xls and the most common file extension known in the different well known office suites
  • generate nice pdf
  • no xml parsing/transforms when you want to read odt & co
  • fill in templates with content (e.g. pod)
  • drawing shapes
  • … (you might want to have a look at the OO developper guide for more informations even if there is lot’s of java examples )

The only major disadvantage is that it requires to connect to an openoffice process. This can be a problem if your sysadmin don’t want to install a real X server in a production environment but this disadvantage is quickly fixed if you install and use Xvfb

This recipe can

  • download OpenOffice from any url (default to OpenOffice 2.3) and extract it in your buildout
  • replace the default python interpreter delivered with OO with the one you are using in your buildout
  • create an egg with pyuno and link it inside your buildout

More info about installation and usage of this recipe on pypi

Linux is only supported by now (and I don’t want to be sorry for not having a mac), if you want to fix this the code is here ;)

Zope 3 dependencies in Zope 2 buildout

Describe a buildout recipe to avoid fetching zope 3 libraries when installing eggs with zope 3 depedencies in a zope 2 buildout

I got tired removing zope.interface, zope.component, zope.deferredimport, zope.event, … of my eggs folder inside my buildout when installing package such as z3c.sqlalchemy in my Zope2 / Plone buildouts …

After the discussion on Zope3-users list and thanks to Jim lights, I wrote a really simple recipe which just create egg links to zope libraries in your develop-eggs so that setuptools can see that the dependencies are
already satisfied.

So if you list your zope library :

$ ls yourbuildout/parts/yourzope2/lib/python/zope

app               configuration    documenttemplate  exceptions  i18n           __init__.py  pagetemplate  schema    structuredtext  testbrowser  viewlet
cachedescriptors  contentprovider  dottedname        formlib     i18nmessageid  interface    proxy         security  tal             testing
component         deprecation      event             hookable    index          modulealias  publisher     server    tales           thread

You will get

$ ls yourbuildout/develop-eggs

zope.app.component.egg-info     zope.app.security.egg-info      zope.dottedname.egg-info     zope.interface.egg-info     zope.structuredtext.egg-info
zope.app.egg-info               zope.app.testing.egg-info       zope.event.egg-info          zope.modulealias.egg-info   zope.tal.egg-info
zope.app.event.egg-info         zope.cachedescriptors.egg-info  zope.exceptions.egg-info     zope.pagetemplate.egg-info  zope.tales.egg-info
zope.app.i18n.egg-info          zope.component.egg-info         zope.formlib.egg-info        zope.proxy.egg-info         zope.testbrowser.egg-info
zope.app.interface.egg-info     zope.configuration.egg-info     zope.hookable.egg-info       zope.publisher.egg-info     zope.testing.egg-info
zope.app.pagetemplate.egg-info  zope.contentprovider.egg-info   zope.i18n.egg-info           zope.schema.egg-info        zope.thread.egg-info
zope.app.publisher.egg-info     zope.deprecation.egg-info       zope.i18nmessageid.egg-info  zope.security.egg-info      zope.viewlet.egg-info
zope.app.schema.egg-info        zope.documenttemplate.egg-info  zope.index.egg-info          zope.server.egg-info

Where each of these file will be seen for setuptools as an egg:

$ cat yourbuildout/develop-eggs/zope.app.component.egg-info

Metadata-Version: 1.0
Name: zope.app.component
Version: 0.0

Sure this might look like an ugly hook but I can’t wait for zope 2 eggification …

Buildout and Virtualenv

How and why use buildout with virtualenv

Buildout is this wonderful tool which helps you to automate setup and configuration of your applications.

Virtualenv is a tool which will help you to isolate your python environment

A few days ago I got stuck during a long time because I didn’t see that one library I installed in my global site-packages of my favourite python 2.4 (on my ubuntu: /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/) was a lower version of a library I was using in my buildout. Package was sqlalchemy 0.4 in my global sites-package and my buildout based application was using sqlalchemy 0.3.8 … Here is a simple solution to avoid this kind of things.

Idea is to start buildout with a python free of any external library. Virtualenv is the answer.

Install Virtualenv

Easy:

$ easy_install virtualenv

you will have then a file that you can run: /usr/bin/virtualenv

Let’s say you have a buildout configuration go into it:

$ cd myApp.buildout
$ ls -l
bootstrap.py
buildout.cfg

Now you just have to create the python environment without any access to the global site-packages with virtualenv:

$ virtualenv --no-site-packages .

You will have then your new python in the bin folder :

$ ls -l bin
activate
easy_install
easy_install-2.4
python2.4

You can now run the buildout configuration with your new python:

$ ./bin/python2.4 bootstrap.py
$ ./bin/buildout

This will create you a nice and totally isolated environment …