Installing Zope

This document descibes how to get going with Zope.

Prerequisites

In order to use Zope, you must have the following pre-requisites available:

• A supported version of Python, including the development support if installed from system-level packages. Supported versions include:
  • 2.6.x
• Zope needs the Python zlib module to be importable. If you are building your own Python from source, please be sure that you have the headers installed which correspond to your system’s zlib.
• A C compiler capable of building extension modules for your Python (gcc recommended). This is not necessary for Windows as binary releases of the parts that would need compiling are always made available.
• If you wish to install Zope as a Service on Windows, you will need to have the pywin32 package installed.

Installing Zope

The recommended way to install Zope is within a virtualized Python environment using virtualenv as follows:

$ virtualenv --no-site-packages my_zope
$ cd my_zope
$ bin/easy_install -i http://download.zope.org/Zope2/index/<Zope version> Zope2

If you don’t already have virtualenv installed on your system, download the latest release from the virtualenv PyPI page, unpack it, and install it, e.g.:

$ wget http://pypi.python.org/packages/source/v/virtualenv/virtualenv-1.4.6.tar.gz
$ tar xzf virtualenv-1.4.6.tar.gz
$ cd virtuaenv-1.4.6
$ /path/to/python2.6 setup.py install

If you wish to manage your Zope instance using buildout, please see the Installing and Zope with zc.buildout.

Creating a Zope Instance

Once you’ve installed Zope, you will need to create an “instance home”. This is a directory that contains configuration and data for a Zope server process. The instance home is created using the mkzopeinstance script:

$ bin/mkzopeinstance

You will be asked to provide a user name and password for an administrator’s account during mkzopeinstance. To see the available command-line options, run the script with the --help option:

$ bin/mkzopeinstance --help

Note

The traditional “inplace” build is no longer supported. Always use mkzopeinstance to create instances outside the virtualenv environment.

After installation, refer to Configuring and Running Zope for documentation on configuring and running Zope.