Getting started with Zope for Linux and Solaris - What is Zope? (
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Zope is a couple of things. First, it's a Web application
server. It other words, it serves up Web applications, which is what you interact
with whenever you submit a comment to a "blog," or when you put stuff into your
e-commerce shopping cart. A Web application is called that because it only requires
a Web browser for access. They're usually pretty ease to use, although programming
them is an entirely different matter.
Secondly, Zope is a Content Management Server. It allows an experienced Zope
programmer to quickly build a customized content management system (CMS) that,
for example, displays selected Zope functions to users, while still allowing other
functions to be later programmed in if necessary. An example of this is a website
that allows a user to input, format, and post text, such as a press release, without
the need of heavy HTML formatting on their part.
Because of the growing complexity of Web applications, it's becoming increasingly
important to mix numerous systems, technologies, and - more importantly - development
teams. The database guys need to make sure they're in sync with the Web guys.
The Web guys are asking the application programmers to deliver what they need
in order to connect to the database. All the while, the application programmers
are still waiting for the specification from both of them. Development teams need
a common basis for their work. Zope provides this basis by allowing you to mix
HTML, DTML (Zope's own scripting language), SQL, Python, and maybe even a little
Perl into Zope as needed.
Zope's biggest strength is the fact that, since it's written in Python, it's
object-oriented. It also comes with an integrated object-oriented database (ZODB)
and Web server (ZServer). Since its transaction oriented, it allows users to do
things like undo actions and so on. It can be connected with numerous relational
databases via its Database Adapters (DAs): Oracle, Sybase, MySQL, Postgres, and
Interbase. In addition to all this, the Zope community makes available hundreds
of applications just for Zope (known as Zope products), which can be easily implemented
by users with no programming knowledge using Zope's integrated web management
system (I'll talk a bit more about this later).{mospagebreak title=Downloading
and Installing} For the sake of simplicity, I'll be installing Zope from the .tgz
packaged binary release available
here (Zope.org). At the time of this writing, the most current stable release is
Zope 2.6.2. If you're interested in using prebuilt RPM and DEB releases for Red
Hat, SuSE or Debian, check out
http://zope.org/Members/medienlabor/packages. Some distributions include Zope as an optional component in their basic install
(Red Hat, for example, includes Zope in its Power Tools package). In that case,
you should check the included documentation on how to get started with Zope. If
you're using Solaris, make sure that you're using GNUtar and gunzip, not the default
tar program, which can't handle the length of file paths. You can grab GNUtar
from the
Solaris Package Archive.
Although I'm doing the installation on Red Hat Linux 9.0, these instructions
should be good for most other Linux systems, as well as Solaris. Other operating
systems might require that you compile Zope. Again, for the sake of simplicity,
I will presume that the user will be you and that you will install and run Zope
from your own home directory (in this case, its /home/omar). To extract, open
up a console window and type the following (not including the dollar sign or anything
before it):
[omar@localhost omar]$ tar xvzf Zope-2.6.2-linux2-x86.tgz
Note that the name of the file will change according to the architecture under
which you run it. For example, the source file for Solaris is named
Zope-2.6.2-solaris-2.8-sparc.tgz. Untarring the package will unpack Zope into a new directory named according
to the file you downloaded, for example,
/home/omar/Zope-2.6.2-linux2-x86/. To install the application, type the following:
[omar@localhost omar]$ cd Zope-2.6.2-linux2-x86/
[omar@localhost Zope-2.6.2-linux2-x86]$
./install
When Zope installs, it automatically creates the user 'admin' and autogenerates
a password. We'll cover how to change that password in the next section. For the
moment, you'll want to keep it somewhere safe. As far as the installation goes
- that's pretty much it. Congratulations!
If you're running an "unsupported" operating system, or if you just want to install
Zope from source, worry not, for the source installation is almost as easy as
the binary installation. There are a couple of things you have to be sure of before
you go on installing Zope however:
- Make sure you have a C compiler, preferably GNU gcc.
- Make sure you have a recent version of make, preferably GNU make.
- Make sure you have Python installed on your system. To be on the safe side, don't
go with the latest version. In fact, Zope.org recommends Python 2.1.
As for the Python requirement, if you're compiling Zope from source, you should
compile
Python as well (check this site for compilation instructions). Python is included in
the binary versions of Zope, but not in the source. Also, some vendor-supplied
versions of Zope include Python, yet lack the necessary development files to compile
Zope from source.
Now that you have all the necessary components, download the latest version of
the Zope source from the Zope.org
download page. Once you've downloaded it to the desired directory (again, I'll presume this
is your home directory), type in the following set of commands:
[omar@localhost omar]$ tar xvzf Zope-2.6.2-src.tgz
[omar@localhost omar]$ cd
Zope-2.6.2-src/
[omar@localhost Zope-2.6.2-src]$ python wo_pcgi.py
----------------------------------------------------
Deleting
'.pyc' and '.pyo' files recursively under
/home/omar/Zope-2.6.2-src...
Done.
----------------------------------------------------
Compiling python modules
.....
chmod 0711 /home/omar/Zope-2.6.2-src/var
----------------------------------------------------
setting
dir permissions
----------------------------------------------------
creating
default database
chmod 0600 /home/omar/Zope-2.6.2-src/var/Data.fs
----------------------------------------------------
Creating
start script, start
chmod 0711 /home/omar/Zope-2.6.2-src/start
----------------------------------------------------
Creating
stop script, stop
chmod 0711 /home/omar/Zope-2.6.2-src/stop
----------------------------------------------------
creating
default inituser file
Note:
The initial user name and password are 'admin'
and 'zM8fQy0k'.
You can change the name and password through
the web interface or using the 'zpasswd.py' script.
chmod 0600
/home/omar/Zope-2.6.2-src/inituser
----------------------------------------------------
Done!
Note that in Zope, the build directory and the install directory are one and
the same. Congratulations! Any which way you decided to do it, Zope is now installed.
Hazzah!
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