System requirements when building from source

• bash or another Bourne shell variant
• Python 2.4.2 or later installed somewhere in the system PATH (Python 2.5 is not supported)
• GNU make
• A C compiler (gcc recommended)

Recommendations

• You are recommended to build and install Zope as a non-root user.

Building Zope

To build Zope, run the conventional UNIX build sequence from within the Zope source tree:

    ./configure --prefix=/where/to/install/zope
    make

If you do not specify a --prefix option, during a later step, Zope will be installed into a default location.

If the configure script cannot find a suitable Python interpreter for use with Zope, it will complain with an informative error message. If this happens, you may use the --with-python command-line option to configure to specify which Python interpreter to use. Run ./configure --help to see other command-line options available via the configure script.

Optional: Building and Installing Zope In-Place (SVN checkouts only)

Older versions of Zope were typically run directly from the source directory itself. This is useful for development purposes. You can regain that behavior by performing the following sequence of commands within a Zope source directory:

./configure make instance

This command also creates an administrative user with the specified username and password.

WARNING: "make instance" doesn't work on FreeBSD 5.0 and presumably other platforms. You should either use GNU make (gmake instance), or use "make install" instead.

Making an "In-Place" instance builds the binary files and creates the files necessary for a Zope instance to be run directly within the build directory (e.g. in-place). You may start Zope by running:

      ./bin/zopectl start

See ./log/event.log for any output which may happen during start of Zope. If anything goes wrong you will see there.

If you use

./bin/zopectl fg

instead, the output is generated to the screen. In this case Zope does not detach from terminal.

Optional: Building Zope Using The "Clean-Source-Tree" Method

You can run the configure command from outside of the Zope source tree. If you do so, the makefile will be written to your current directory. The files generated by the build process (via make) will be written to the directory from which you run configure. You can then use make install to install these files to their canonical locations. This feature is to support source locations which are not writable.

Installing Zope

To install Zope to the place you've specified via the --prefix option (or to the default location if you didn't specify a prefix), type:

    make install

Creating a Zope Instance Home

Once you've performed the install step, to begin actually using Zope, you will need to create an "instance home", which is a directory that contains configuration and data for a Zope server process. The instance home is created using the mkzopeinstance.py script:

    /where/to/install/zope/bin/mkzopeinstance.py

You will be asked to provide a user name and password for an administrator's account during mkzopeinstance. Command-line options to mkzopeinstance are available, and can be investigated by running mkzopeinstance.py --help.

Starting Zope

Once an instance home has been created, the Zope server can now be started using this command:

/location/of/zope/instance/bin/zopectl start

During start, zope emits log messages into ./log/event.log You can examine it with the usual tools (cat, more, tail) and see if there are any errors preventing zope from starting.

/location/of/zope/instance/bin/zopectl fg

can be used to instead output these messages to the console. This way zope does not detach from terminal.

If you get errors indicating that addresses are in use, then you will have to supply arguments to runzope to change the ports used for HTTP or FTP. The default HTTP and FTP ports used by Zope are 8080 and 8021 respectively. You can change the ports used by editing ./etc/zope.conf apropriately.

The section usually is like this:

# valid keys are "address" and "force-connection-close" address 8080 # force-connection-close on

address can just be a port number as shown, but also a host:port pair to bind to a specific interface only.

zopectl can be linked as rc-script in the usual start directories on linux or other system V unix variants.

You can use zopectl interactively as a command shell by just calling it w/o any arguments. Try help there and help to find out about additionally commands of zopectl. These commands work also on command line.

By default, zopectl start will start a background process that manages Zope and zopectl stop will stop the background process.

Logging In To Zope

Once you've started Zope, you can then connect to the Zope webserver by directing your browser to:

     http://yourhost:8080/manage

.. where yourhost is the DNS name or IP address of the machine running Zope. If you changed the HTTP port as described, use a port number of 8080 + the port-base value.

You will be prompted for a user name and password. Use the user name and password you provided in response to the prompts issued during the "make instance" process.

Now you're off and running! You should be looking at the Zope management screen which is divided into two frames. On the left you can navigate between Zope objects and on the right you can edit them by selecting different management functions with the tabs at the top of the frame.

If you haven't used Zope before, you should head to the Zope web site and read some documentation. The Zope Book is a good place to start. You can access the Zope Book at:

http://www.zope.org/Documentation/Books/ZopeBook

Integrating Zope With An Existing Webserver

Zope doesn't require any existing webserver to run, but you can integrate it with other webservers as necessary. See the WEBSERVER.txt file for more information about configuring Zope with an existing web server. There is also information about integrating Zope with existing webservers on the Zope.org website.

Troubleshooting

• This version of Zope requires Python 2.4.1 or better.
• The Python you run Zope with must have threads compiled in, which is the case for a vanilla build. Warning: Zope will not run with a Python version that uses libpth. You must use libpthread.
• To build Python extensions you need to have Python configuration information available. If your Python comes from an RPM you may need the python-devel (or python-dev) package installed too. If you built Python from source all the configuration information should already be available.
• See CHANGES.txt for important notes on this version of Zope.