Since Day 1 with Plone circa 2004, I’ve always taken pride in and greatly enjoyed refining my development environment. It’s been stable for a while now (> 1 year or so) so I thought I’d share.

Operating system

Mac OS X Latest (Lion, at the time of this writing)

Terminal

Mac OS X Terminal

Editor

Vim

Python

Yes. All versions, via the collective Python buildout:

• https://github.com/collective/buildout.python

Plone

Yes. All versions, via pythonpackages.com:

• http://docs.pythonpackages.com/en/latest/advanced.html

Additional tools

A shell script to run virtualenv, buildout, etc:

#!/bin/sh
if ! [ -n "$1" ]
then
    echo "Usage:\n\n$0 <dir>\n"
    exit 1
fi
if ! [ -d $1 ]
then
    mkdir $1
fi
cd $1
virtualenv-2.7 .
bin/pip install zc.buildout
bin/buildout init
cat << EOF > buildout.cfg
[buildout]
extends = http://build.pythonpackages.com/buildout/plone/4.2.x-dev
EOF
bin/buildout
bin/plone start
sleep 4
echo "Adding Plone site..."
curl -d form.submitted:boolean="True" http://admin:admin@localhost:8080/@@plone-addsite\?site_id=Plone
bin/plone stop
bin/plone fg

A Python script to create temporary directories:

#!/usr/bin/env python

import os
import tempfile
print os.path.abspath(tempfile.mkdtemp())

A default buildout config file:

[buildout]
eggs-directory = /Users/aclark/Developer/eggs-directory
download-cache = /Users/aclark/Developer/download-cache
extends-cache = /Users/aclark/Developer/extends-cache

Workflow

My typical workflow looks like this:

• Hang in #plone on irc.freenode.net and wait for questions
• Hear question and get inspired to run Plone
• Run: $ test-plone `tmp`

~ 1 minute later I’m browsing http://localhost:8080/Plone and can install add-ons, check ZMI settings, etc.

Enjoy.