Creating a buildout defaults file

Description

This makes it possible to share configuration across multiple buildouts, and save some time and disk space.

To set "global" options affecting all buildouts, create a directory .buildout (note leading dot) in your home directory, and add a file there called default.cfg. Any option set here will be applied to the corresponding section in any buildout.cfg that you run, unless it is overridden by a more specific option in the *buildout.cfg file itself.

Note

Windows may error when creating the .buildout directory with "You must type a file name" due to the leading dot. This directory can be created using the command line. Once created, it can be accessed normally in the Windows gui.

The most common options are:

executable

Specify a python interpreter other than the system default. This is useful if you have Python 2.5 installed, say, but you want your buildouts to use another installation of Python 2.4.

eggs-directory

Specify a directory where eggs will be downloaded. This allows multiple buildouts to share the same eggs, saving disk space and download time. Note that only those eggs explicitly required by a particular buildout will be activated. The eggs directory may contain many more eggs (or many different versions of the same package) than what is used at any one time.

download-cache

Specify a shared directory for downloaded archives. Again, this can save disk space and download time. NOTE: before zc.buildout 1.0, this was called download-directory

extends-cache

Specify a shared directory for extended buildout configurations that are downloaded from a URL. As of Plone 3.2 this is how Plone pins the versions of its eggs. This option was added in zc.buildout 1.4.1, prior to that the offline mode in combination with a extends URL would not work.

Here is an example ~/.buildout/default.cfg setting all three:

[buildout]
executable = /opt/python24/bin/python
eggs-directory = /home/username/.buildout/eggs
download-cache = /home/username/.buildout/downloads
extends-cache = /home/username/.buildout/extends

This assumes Python 2.4 is installed in /opt/python2.4. For the last two options to work, you would need to create the directories eggs and downloads inside the ~/.buildout directory.