zcontact 0.1.0a3

An online contact manager built on Zope 3

ZContact is an online contact management application built on the Zope3 web application framework. Below are instructions for managing ZContact on Ubuntu Linux. With some tweaks, this might even work on Mac OSX and Windows.

Quick Start

Follow these instructions to install ZContact and create a default server setup.

0. Install dependencies if they are not installed already (most of these dependencies are from Zope 3):

   $ sudo apt-get install build-essential python-all python-all-dev
     libc6-dev libicu-dev python-setuptools

1. Install ZContact:

   $ sudo easy_install-2.4 zcontact

2. Create an “instance” of zcontact (including server configuration, log files and database) called “MyZContactServer”. Feel free to replace MyZContactServer with whatever you want, or leave it blank and it will default to just “zcontact”:

   $ paster make-config zcontact MyZContactServer

3. Go to the newly created configuration area for your zcontact instance and start the server:

   $ cd MyZContactServer
   $ paster serve deploy.ini

4. ZContact will now be available at http://localhost:8080 .

Updating Your ZContact Installation

To update your ZContact application, simply run the following command and restart your server.

$ sudo easy_install-2.4 -U zcontact

(the -U stands for “Update”).

Running ZContact as a Daemon

To run ZContact as a daemon, go to the directory where your ZContact instance is located and type:

$ paster serve deploy.ini –daemon

The running daemon can be stopped with:

$ paster serve deploy.ini stop

Migrating Data

To migrate data from one zcontact server to another follow these steps:

1. Make sure both zcontact instances are not running.

2. Copy the database file you want to migrate to the new instance. The database file is located in the var/ directory of the ZContact instance and is called Data.fs. You do not need to move any of the Data.fs.* files.

3. Restart your ZContact instance.

Developer Installation

If you want to setup ZContact as a developer (i.e. from a repository checkout) rather than installing it as an egg on your system, follow these steps:

1. Grab a branch of the latest ZContact code from Launchpad:

    $ bzr branch http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~pcardune/zcontact/zcontact-lp
   
   (Note: you can also use bzr checkout instead of bzr branch if you
   don't want to get all the revision information)

2. Change to the directory where you just create the branch:

   $ cd zcontact-lp

3. Run make:

    $ make
   
   (Note: This will run the bootstrap.py script which sets up buildout,
   and it will invoke buildout which downloads all the necessary eggs
   to the eggs/ directory.  If you have a common place where you have
   development eggs available, you should modify buildout.cfg before
   running make.)

4. Run the tests:

   $ make test

5. Create the configuration:

    $ make install
   
   (This adds the var and log directories along with a deploy.ini,
   site.zcml, and zope.conf in the checkout)

6. Start the server:

   $ make run

7. Generate test coverage reports:

   $ make coverage

NOTE: if you get errors about setuptools not being the right version, then you need to install the easy_install script and run:

$ sudo easy_install-2.4 -U setuptools

(The -U option forces setuptools to look online for the latest updates)

If you don’t like using make, or you are not on a Linux system, then try the following:

$ python bootstrap.py
$ ./bin/buildout -vN

A note to the wise: It seems to be the consensus of the Zope community that one should never use the standard system python to run your software because you might screw it up. And screwing up system pythong is not a good idea if you can avoid it. So to really do this properly, you should install your own python by actually downloading the src, compiling it, and installing it to some place like /opt/mypython. Then when you install the checkout, use:

$ /opt/mypython/bin/python bootstrap.py
$ ./bin/buildout -vN

And that will be best.

Getting More Information

Contact me on chat.freenode.net. My most common username is pcardune and I hang around #schooltool and #zope3-dev. Otherwise, email me at paul_at_carduner_dot_net

Please send me requests for other instructions you want to be put into this README file.

place holder for changes