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Script to set up a "safe" development environment for Plone

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plone-devstart is a script to quickly and safely bootstrap a useful Plone development environment.

All you need is the single script,

$ curl -O

You run it with:

$ python <directory>

This will create a Plone development environment in the given directory.

Note: If no directory is specified, the build will be created in the current directory.

Important: You must run with a version of Python that is compatible with the intended Plone version. You will be warned if this is not the case.

To view other options, see:

$ python --help

When plone-devstart is run, it will:

  • Ask for a Plone version number. This must be within a known major/minor version compbination, e.g. a version in the 4.1 series such as 4.1.4. To skip this manual entry step, use the --version command line option.
  • Check that a Known Good Set of packages exists for this version of Plone.
  • Check that the version of Python used to run is compatible with the target version of Plone.
  • If on a non-Windows platform: check for a C compiler (cc), Python header files, and libjpeg header files (necessary for the Python Imaging Library).
  • Check for zlib and SSL support in Python.
  • Create the target directory, if it does not exist.
  • Download and create an isolated virtual Python environment in this directory. This has the effect of creating a Python interpreter that is unaware of any globally installed "site packages" that may interfere with Plone's own versions of certain packages.
  • Download a skeleton Buildout for this version of Plone (see below). If the file buildout.cfg exists, this step will be skipped, unless the --force command line option is given.
  • Download and bootstrap the Buildout environment with the isolated virtual environment Python interpreter.


The Buildout created by contains various development tools, and a simple distribution (in the src/ directory) called plone-customizations that can be used to house template overrides, configuration or other customisations to Plone.

The buildout, which may vary between Plone versions, will contain a README.txt file with details of how it is configured and used.

Version control

If you wish to put the build under version control, you should ignore the following files (e.g. in a .gitignore file if using Git or as the svn:ignore property in Subversion):


Recreating an environment

If you have obtained an environment from source control or elsewhere, and want to perform the system checks and create an isolated Python environment, you can run python (with an appropriate version of Python and possibly with a relative or absolute path to the script) from within an existing directory.

So long as you do not use the --force option, this will perform all of the steps above except downloading and extracting the skeleton build. This should leave all your custom files intact, but will create a new, isolated Python environment and bootstrap buildout to use this.

Frequently Asked Questions

  • Should I not just use the Plone Universal or Windows installers?

Possibly, yes. The installers provide a better-tested, fully standalone environment. If you are mostly interested in getting Plone up and running, they are the best place to start. See

plone-devstart is, as its name implies, more geared at development and customisation. It is able to work with arbitrary versions of Plone, and is lighter weight in that it doesn't install its own Python binary. It also provides a buildout setup with some development tools and a place to put basic customisations.

The key point here is that plone-devstart assumes you have an appropriate Python version installed already. It will check version compatibility, but otherwise it allows you to use a system-installed or custom compiled Python.

  • Why not use ZopeSkel or Paste Script to build this?

The advantage of plone-devstart is that it is a single script with no dependencies. There is no need to have a functioning easy_install or pip to be able to use it.

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