how to run your own private PyPI (Cheeseshop) server

PloneSoftwareCenter 1.5 is heavily developed and not yet released, but the current trunk code is working well to use it as a PyPI-like server. It can be really useful for companies that develop Python software and are looking for a way to centralize their eggs internally. That’s what we use now at Ingeniweb to work on customer projects.

This tutorial explains how to set a cuttting-edge PloneSoftwareCenter server, if you want to be an early-adopter of what will be the next version running on plone.org software center in a few months (but this code is to be used at your own risks of course )

Why a private PyPI ?

You have some python packages you want to treat the same way the Cheeseshop does. In other words you want to work with them with easy_install, zc.buildout, etc..

But these packages are private to your company…

The simplest way is to store your eggs on some network folder. But distutils and setuptools provide a nice set of commands to automatically build and upload eggs at PyPI or any server that implements PyPI apis.

How ? PloneSoftwareCenter !

The Plone community provides a nice tool to manage Python packages, and it is PyPI compatible. In other words it can act like Cheesehop to interact with your command line tools.

It also provides an extensive set of features to manage your releases, run your bug trackers, etc.

See the plone.org products section, it is powered by PSC.

4 steps to install

Thanks to zc.buildout, a Plone Software Center (PSC) is really easy to setup. There’s no binary distribution yet though, so you need to compile a few things.

Step 1 – Pre-requests

If you are under Windows, grab this archive : http://release.ingeniweb.com/third-party-dist/python2.4.4-win32.zip
decompress it, and run “install.bat”. It will install Python 2.4 together with a set of tools, and PATH updates.

If you are under Linux, make sure you have gcc, subversion and make installed. Then install easy_install and PIL,
like this:

$ wget http://peak.telecommunity.com/dist/ez_setup.py
$ python ez_setup.py
$ easy_install http://release.ingeniweb.com/third-party-dist/PILwoTk-1.1.6.4.tar.gz

Step 2 – installing PSC

1. Make a directory on your system called softwarecenter

2. Get into it and grab PSC code with the svn command line:

   $ svn co http://svn.plone.org/svn/collective/Products.PloneSoftwareCenter/buildout/trunk .

3. run the buildout with this set of commands:

   $ python bootstrap.py
   $ bin/buildout

It will take some time, to grab all elements needed to build PSC.

4. run the server

   $ bin/instance start

Step 3 – setting up PSC

Let’s create a Plone website with a PloneSoftwareCenter instance:

1. Open a browser and go to http://localhost:8080/manage. The login/password is admin/admin.
2. On the left part, there’s a dropbox, select “Plone Site” the hit the add button
3. In the form, set the id to “plone” and hit enter.
4. Go to http://localhost:8080/plone/prefs_install_products_form
5. Check “PloneSoftwareCenter” on the left side and hit “Install”
6. Go to http://localhost:8080/plone
7. In the “Add new…” menu, Click on “software center”
8. In the form, in the Title, put “Catalog”
9. Check Use Classifiers to display Categories (with Topic :: *) under Classifiers
10. Hit the Save button

Your Software Center is ready and available at http://localhost:8080/plone/catalog

Step 4 – setting up the client-side

Now let’s set the client-side so people can use your Software Center:

1. install iw.dist:

   $ easy_install iw.dist

2. create a file in your home directory, called .pypirc with this content:

   [distutils]
   index-servers =
     pypi
     local
   
   [pypi]
   username:YOUR_PYPI_LOGIN
   password:YOUR_PYPI_PASSWORD
   
   [local]
   repository:http://localhost:8080/plone/catalog/
   username:admin
   password:admin

Of course, the localhost value will differ if you are located on another machine..

iw.dist adds two new commands in distutils: mregister and mupload. These commands enhance register and upload to make distutils work with multiple servers. This should be merged hopefully in Python 2.6 very soon.

Let’s use it !

Now, you will have two new commands in distutils, called ‘mregister‘ and ‘mupload‘ that will let you use either your PSC either PyPI.

Let’s upload an egg into PSC:

$ python setup.py mregister sdist bdist_egg mupload -r local

Let’s upload an egg into PyPI:

$ python setup.py mregister sdist bdist_egg mupload -r pypi

if -r is omited, pypi is the default one.

If you want to use PSC in zc.buildout or easy_install, you can provide http://localhost:8080/plone/catalog/simple as a find-links or index value:

[buildout]  find-links = http://localhost:8080/plone/catalog/simple

Or:

$ easy_install -f http://localhost:8080/plone/catalog/simple my.egg

That’s it !