Configuration reference

This is a Buildout recipe that can download, install and configure one or several OpenERP servers, web clients, gtk clients and addons modules, from official or custom sources, or any bzr, hg, git or svn repositories. It currently supports versions 6.0, 6.1 and 7.0, with gunicorn deployment and an additional cron worker. It works under Linux and MacOs. It might work under Windows but it is untested.

A “Buildout recipe” is the engine behind a Buildout “part”. A “buildout part” is a part of a larger application built with the Buildout sandbox build system. Using Buildout is harmless for your system because it is entirely self-contained in a single directory: just delete the directory and the buildout is gone. You never have to use administrative rights, except for build dependencies.

The buildout configuration file and parts

The intents of this section is to highlights a few facts that we’ve found especially useful. People should refer to the reference zc.buildout documentation and in particular to the configuration file syntax (these links may have to be adapted for the version in use).

Buildout configuration files are written almost in INI format, and always start with a buildout section:

[buildout]
parts = openerp

The parts option specifies which parts to install by default if one runs bin/buildout with no explicit install directive.

Parts directly correspond to sections of the configuration file, and must specify the recipe that’s to be used:

[openerp]
recipe = anybox.recipe.openerp:server

An extra dependency of the recipe gets required at runtime like this:

recipe = anybox.recipe.openerp[bzr]:server

Note

inline comments

As of version 1.9 of the recipe, inline comments starting with a semicolon not at the beginning of a line are supported in the recipe’s specific options, and especially in the multi line ones, whereas zc.buildout does not support them.

For more detail, check anybox.recipe.openerp.utils.option_splitlines().

Command line

The configuration file can be specified from the command line:

bin/buildout -c buildout.local.cfg

Recipe options can be overridden from the command-line:

bin/buildout -c buildout.local.cfg openerp:clean=True openerp:xmlrpc_port=8169

Parts that are not listed in the buildout configuration section can be explicitely installed:

bin/buildout install openerp funkload static-analysis

Inheritance

A buildout configuration file can reference another one and change some options (note the += notation that’s not part of the INI format):

[buildout]
extends = buildout.base.cfg

[openerp]
eggs += nose
        coverage
with_devtools = True

These extensions can be chained. This allows in particular project maintainers to separate the configuration options that are considered to be part of the project from those that depend on the server environment (ports, database hosts…)

Default configuration

If available, the settings from $HOME/.buildout/default.cfg always apply, as if it where the default value of the extends option.

This is commonly used with the eggs-directory and openerp-downloads-directory options, because these amount to create a user-level cache.

Finally, you may also use extends in default.cfg to point to a system-wide configuration file (useful to enforce policies at the organization or physical site level, such as local index servers, mirrors, etc.).

OpenERP recipes

There are three different recipes bundled with anybox.recipe.openerp. The option line to put in your part (see The buildout configuration file and parts) is the following.

Server

recipe = anybox.recipe.openerp:server

Note

If you plan on using Launchpad’s short Bazaar branch notation (lp:), then you need to add the bzr extra-dependency:

recipe = anybox.recipe.openerp[bzr]:server

Web client

recipe = anybox.recipe.openerp:webclient

GTK client

recipe = anybox.recipe.openerp:gtkclient

Note

from OpenERP 7.0 onwards, the web and gtk clients aren’t that useful anymore.

Options for assembly and source management

version

Specifies the OpenERP version to use. It can be:

  • The version number of an official OpenERP (server, web client or gtk client):

    version = 6.0.3
    
  • A custom download:

    version = url http://example.com/openerp.tar.gz
    
  • An absolute or a relative path:

    version = path /my/path/to/a/custom/openerp
    
  • A custom bzr, hg, git or svn branch or repository. The syntax is the same as with the addons option:

    recipe = anybox.recipe.openerp[bzr]:server
    version = bzr lp:openobject-server/6.1 openerp61 last:1
    

    Note

    the [bzr] extra dependency declaration is useful for resolution of the lp: address shortcuts.

  • A nightly build:

    version = nightly 6.1 20120814-233345
    
  • or (dangerously unpinned version):

    version = nightly 6.1 latest
    
  • or even more dangerous:

    version = nightly trunk latest
    

addons

Specifies additional OpenERP addons, either a local path or a remote repository.

Example:

recipe = anybox.recipe.openerp[bzr]:server
addons = local ../some/relative/path/for/custom_addons/
         local /some/other/absolute/path/for/custom_addons
         bzr lp:openobject-addons/trunk/    addons0 last:1
         hg  http://example.com/some_addons addons1 default
         git http://example.com/some_addons addons2 master
         svn http://example.com/some_addons addons3 head
         bzr lp:openerp-web/trunk/ openerp-web last:1 subdir=addons

Remote repositories can either contain addons subdirectories, or be a single addon. In that latter case, called a standalone addon, the group option must be used to place the addon in an intermediate subdirectory, to match the structure expected by OpenERP.

Standalone addons are not supported in the local case (the directory is considered under full responsibility of the user).

Note

the [bzr] extra-dependency declaration as showcased above in the recipe line is necessary for resolution of lp: launchpad address shortcuts.

Warning

Never name one of these addons directory simply addons. It leads to obscure and blocking install errors for addons in other directories, claiming that some files don’t exist while they do.

For remote repositories, the syntax is:

TYPE  URL  DESTINATION  REVISION  [OPTIONS]

with the following semantics:

TYPE:one of bzr, hg, git or svn
URL:is any URL scheme supported by the versionning tool
DESTINATION:is the local directory that will be created (relative or absolute)
REVISION:is any version specification supported (revision, tag, etc.)
OPTIONS:each one takes the form name=value. No whitespace is allowed inside an option, and no escaping is implemented.

Repositories are updated on each build according to the specified revision. You must be careful with the revision specification.

Buildout offline mode is supported. In that case, update to the specified revision is performed, if the VCS allows it (Subversion does not).

The group addons option

Note

new in version 1.9.0

The purpose of this option is to accomodate standalone addons. Indeed, OpenERP expects its configuration to refer to directory that contain addons, but some people might prefer to version their addons in separate VCS repositories.

The group option allows to specify an intermediate directory into which the standalone addon should actually be set:

git http://example.com/some_addons some/target_dir group=some_group

The addon will end up in some/some_group/target_dir and some/some_group will be the directory registered to OpenERP

Even if you have only standalone addon to register, you must do it with the group option.

Warning

up to 1.8 versions, the recipe used to create an intermediate directory silently for standalone addons, this is not supported any more

The subdir addons option

The subdir option, if used, makes the recipe use the given subdirectory of the repository as the addons directory. A very common example is the line for standard web addons from bzr:

bzr lp:openerp-web/7.0 openerp-web last:1 subdir=addons

The bzr-init addons option

‘bzr-init’ defines the way the bzr branch is initialized for addons or server declared with a bzr repository path.

Note

new in version 1.7.0

Possible values:

branch (default):
 Working copy initialized with the command bzr branch url ...
stacked-branch:Working copy initialized with the command bzr branch --stacked url ...
lightweight-checkout:
 Working copy initialized with the command bzr checkout --lightweight url ...

The depth Git option

Note

new in vertion 1.9.0

depth is a per-repository configurable option to create and maintain Git shallow clones. It allows to specify the maximum history one wishes to keep in the local repository, hence minimizing the disk space needed and initial cloning time.

Example:

version = git http://github.com/odoo/odoo.git odoo 8.0 depth=1

You may also use this option to override the global git-depth option, and in particular cancel it by specifying None:

version = git http://github.com/odoo/odoo.git odoo 8.0 depth=None

Currently, adding this option to an existing repository does not reduce the disk footprint immediately.

Warning

the depth option is abrasive, and should be avoided on developper setups: you may lose unpushed commits. It is, however, a good fit for automated build or deployment systems on which the history does not usually matter.

Git SHA pinning and the branch option

The branch option is used to specify a branch indication to help retrieving remote commits that can’t be fetched directly.

In Git, a commit can never be fetched by its SHA, but the recipe supports is nevertheless, so that version pinning can be achieved without enough authority to add tags in remote.

To do so, the recipe must perform first a broader fetch, then hope the wished commit has become available locally. The branch option narrows said fetch for better efficiency and reliability.

Note

the branch option is new in vertion 1.9.1

Warning

non tagged commits can become unreachable, especially if the remote repository gets lots of rebasing. If possible, pinning on tags is always to be preferred.

merges

Specify which VCS branches need to be merged into repositories specified under addons or version. The syntax is the same as for repositories specified under these directives.

Currently only merges on bzr and git repositories are supported (requires git 1.8)

Note

new in version 1.9.0

eggs

This option behaves like the identically named one of the most common zc.recipe.egg.

Starting from version 0.16 of the recipe, you don’t need to put anything in this option by default: the recipe is supposed to add all needed dependencies for OpenERP by itself, but you have to specify additional eggs needed by addons, or just useful ones:

eggs = ipython
       python-ldap
       openobject-library

revisions

This option allows to further precise what has been specified through the addons and version options by fixing VCS revisions.

The main use-case it to apply it in an extension buildout configuration file:

[buildout]
extends = base.cfg

[openerp]
revisions = 4320  ; main software
            addons-openerp 7109

As you can see in that example, the first token is the target filesystem path, as in the addons option, the second one is the revision, except in the case of the main software (if VCS based), for which there’s no filesystem path.

Some interesting use-cases:

  • temporary fixing some revision in cas of upstream regression with no impact on your main development configuration (no risk to commit an unwanted freeze if the main configuration is itself versionned).
  • freezing satisfactory revisions in a release process (the recipe can do that automatically for you, see freeze-to option below).

clean

If set to true, this option will clean remove python object files from the main server part and addons before any update or install, and perform relevant VCS idea of “clean, purge”.

Warning

developers can lose their uncommitted work with this option.

This option is not meant for developer setups, rather for deployment and continuous integration. To avoid making a dedicated buildout configuration for you CI bot, just add it on the command-line.

Note that tarball downloads get re-extracted afresh in any case.

vcs-revert

Possible value: on-merge (more are been thought of)

If this option is used with the on-merge value, the VCS repositories will be reverted, losing all local modifications after the pull/update, right before the merge.

This is especially useful in unattended executions, to clean up any previous failed merges.

Currently only bzr and git repositories get reverted.

Note

new in version 1.9.0

git-depth

This is the global variant of the The depth Git option option (please read the provisions there carefully, as it is potentially dangerous).

Setting a value to git-depth is the same as doing it for all involved Git repositories, but does not have precedence over per-repository settings (which can also remove it altogether).

This option is especially meant for automated tools (continuous integration, unattended deployment) as they can easily add it from the command-line to any buildout.

Note

new in version 1.9.0

OpenERP options

With the OpenERP buildout recipes, OpenERP options are managed directly from the buildout file (usually buildout.cfg) from the part.

The OpenERP configuration files are generated by OpenERP itself in the directory specified by etc-directory, which defaults to the etc directory under your buildout directory.

The settings of the OpenERP configuration files are specified using a dotted notation in which the fist segment is the name of the corresponding section of the OpenERP config file and the second is the option name.

The specified options will just overwrite the existing options in the corresponding config files. You don’t have to replicate all the options in your section of the buildout file. If a setting or a section does not natively exist in the openerp config file, it can be created from there for your application.

For example you can specify the xmlrpc port for the server or even an additional option that does not exist in the default config file:

options.xmlrpc_port = 8069
options.additional_option = "foobar"

It will end-up in the server configuration as:

[options]
xmlrpc_port = 8069
additional_option = "foobar"

For the web client you can specify the port and company url with:

global.server.socket_port = 8080
openerp-web.company.url = 'http://anybox.fr'

It will modify the corresponding web client config:

[global]
server.socket_port = 8080

[openerp-web]
company.url = 'http://anybox.fr'

Note

Buildout configuration inheritance is especially useful to manage the separation between a reusable buildout configuration and local settings.

Note

Note that for security reasons, the superadmin password is not set by default. If you want databases to be manageable through the UI, you may either explicitely set that password in the buildout part configuration or even set it temporarily in the etc/openerp.conf file.

Options for executables generation and serving

script_name

Warning

as of version 1.7.0, this option is deprecated because of its redundancy with openerp_scripts.

OpenERP startup scripts are created in the bin directory. By default the name is start_<part_name>, so you can have several startup scripts for each part if you configure several OpenERP servers or clients.

You can pass additional typical arguments to the server via the startup script, such as -i or -u options.

You can choose another name for the script by using the script_name option

script_name = start_erp

gevent_script_name

..note :: for Odoo (formerly OpenERP) version 8 and onwards

Lets you control the name of the asynchronous longpolling listener leveraging gevent (known as openerp-gevent in the basic install).

The default is gevent_<PART>.

Note

new in version 1.8.4

openerp_scripts

This option lets you install console scripts provided by any of the loaded eggs, so that they can access to OpenERP internals and load databases.

Note

new in version 1.7.0

Here we describe the format of the option only. For explanation about what it means and how to use it, please refer to OpenERP Scripts.

The option is multiline. Each line specifies exactly one script, and must respect the following format:

ENTRY_POINT_NAME[=WISHED_SCRIPT_NAME] [MODIFIER [MODIFIER […]]]

Each modifier takes the MODIFIER_NAME=MODIFIER_VALUE form. No whitespace is allowed in modifiers, entry point, nor produced script names.

Here’s the list of currently available modifiers, with links inside the dedicated chapter about OpenERP scripts).

command-line-options:
 Command-line options
arguments:Arguments and session
openerp-log-level:
 OpenERP log level

Full example:

openerp_scripts = my_script arguments=session
                  my_other_script=actual-script-name arguments=3,session
                  nosetests=nosetests command-line-options=-d
                  sphinx-build=sphinx-build openerp-log-level=ERROR command_line_options=-d

upgrade_script_name

This option lets you specify the wished name for the upgrade script. The default value is upgrade_<part_name>.

Note

new in version 1.8.0.

We are actually not sure to keep that option, since it’s redundant with openerp_scripts.

upgrade_script

Note

new in version 1.8.0

This option lets you specify a source (.py) file and a callable defined in that file to perform database upgrades. The default value is:

upgrade_script = upgrade.py run

If the specified source file doest not exist, the recipe will initialize it with a simple and meaningful sample content, consistent with the default value above.

If you want not to have an upgrade script, just override this option with a blank value:

upgrade_script =

See the full Upgrade scripts documentation to learn more about upgrade scripts.

Note

new in version 1.8.0

gunicorn

Gunicorn integration is only supported on OpenERP ≥ 6.1. Any value of this option makes the recipe generate a script to start OpenERP with Gunicorn and (new in version 1.1) a dedicated script to handle cron jobs.

For OpenERP 6.1, the only accepted values are direct and proxied. Any value is suitable for OpenERP ≥ 7

Proxied mode

For OpenERP 6.1, a special value of the gunicorn option is to be used if you plan to run Gunicorn behind a reverse proxy:

gunicorn = proxied

This behaviour has been kept for OpenERP ≥ 7 to keep backwards compatibility, but the option is now superseded by the general proxy_mode option of the server. In the buildout context, that’d be:

options.proxy_mode = True

Gunicorn options

Gunicorn-specific options are to be specified with the gunicorn. prefix and will end up in the the Gunicorn python configuration file etc/gunicorn_<part_name>.conf.py, such as:

gunicorn.workers = 8

If you don’t specify gunicorn.bind, then a value is constructed from the relevant options for the OpenERP script (currently options.xmlrpc_port and options.xmlrpc_interface).

Other simple supported options and their default values are (See also the Gunicorn configuration documentation)

gunicorn.workers = 4
gunicorn.timeout = 240
gunicorn.max_requests = 2000

The recipe sets the proper WSGI entry point according to OpenERP version, you may manually override that with an option:

gunicorn.entry_point = mypackage:wsgi.app

You may specify the Gunicorn script name with the gunicorn_script_name option. The configuration file will be named accordingly.

The gunicorn.preload_databases option (one database per line) lets you specify databases to load in a post_fork hook. With this setting, the worker processes will be ready for requests on these databases right after their startup. Moreover, Gunicorn does not handle any request to a worker until it is ready. Therefore, in workloads where one or a few databases are actually used, this setting keeps the user experience snappy even in the event of frequent worker restarts, and allows for graceful restarts (use this for minor changes only).

server_wide_modules

Note

new in version 1.9.0

This multi-line option lets you specify addons to be loaded directly at startup, independently of what is installed in the database.

It plays the same role as the --load command-line option of the main OpenERP startup script, with lower precedence if the latter is also specified. Examples:

server_wide_modules = custom_homepage

Since there is no entry in the OpenERP configuration file corresponding to --load, this recipe option helps bringing uniformity accross running instances of the project by enclosing this notion in the shippable configuration.

It can also be leveraged by other scripts or recipe subsystems, notably the gunicorn startup script.

Note

in any case, the web addon is loaded as a server-wide one.

openerp_command_name

Warning

as of version 1.7.0, this option is deprecated because of its redundancy with openerp_scripts.

OpenERP Command Line Tools (openerp-command for short) is an alternative set of command-line tools that may someday subsede the current monolithic startup script. Currently experimental, but already very useful in development mode.

It is currently enabled if the with_devtools option is on.

This works by requiring the openerp-command python distribution, which is not on PyPI as of this writting, but comes bundled with the current OpenERP trunk (believed to be the future OpenERP 8).

As for other scripts, you can control its name of the produced script, e.g:

openerp_command_name = oe

the name defaults otherwise to <part_name>_command. Note that oe is the classical name for this script outside of the realm of this buildout recipe.

Note

openerp-command has first been introduced as a separate project while OpenERP 7.0 was in development stage. People wanting to use it with OpenERP 7.0 can still grab it from Launchpad with the gp.vcsdevelop extension:

[buildout]
extensions = gp.vcsdevelop
vcs-extend-develop = bzr+http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~openerp/openerp-command/7.0#egg=openerp-command

Warning

On OpenERP 7, do not use to launch production servers, especially in an automatic way, openerp-command is really unstable and that may damage your installation.

scripts

Note

This option is useful for general purpose scripts only. For scripts related to OpenERP, see OpenERP Scripts, and the openerp_scripts option.

This option controls the generation of console scripts declared by the various involved Python distributions (either directly required with the eggs option, or by dependency).

By default, no such script is generated, but you may specify some according to your needs, with the same semantics as in zc.recipe.egg.

scripts = change_tz

In the current state, beware to not require the same script in different parts or rename them. See https://bugs.launchpad.net/anybox.recipe.openerp/+bug/1020967 for details.

startup_delay

Specifies a delay in seconds to wait before actually launching OpenERP. This option was a preliminary hack to support both gunicorn instance and a legacy instance. The Gunicorn startup script (see below) itself is not affected by this setting

startup_delay = 3

Options for development, QA and introspection

with_devtools

Allows to load development and install useful devlopment and testing tools, notably the following scripts:

  • test_openerp: a uniform test launcher for all supported versions. See test_script_name option below for details.
  • openerp_command: see openerp_command_name option below for details. Not installed for OpenERP major versions less than or equal to 6.1.

This option is False by default, hence it’s activated this way:

with_devtools = true

It will also add some dependencies that are typical to development setups (tests related packages etc.) and automatically load where needed helpers, such as anybox.testing.datetime (allows to cheat with system time).

test_script_name

Warning

as of version 1.7.0, this option is deprecated because of its redundancy with openerp_scripts.

If the with_devtools is set to True, the recipe will create a test script, which is named by default test_<part_name>. You may override the name in the configuration as in the following example:

test_script_name = test_erp

The test script takes the same arguments as the regular startup script:

bin/test_openerp --help
bin/test_openerp -d test_db -i purchase,sale

At the time of this writing, all this script does compared to the regular startup script is to bring uniformity across OpenERP versions by tweaking options internally.

As of version 1.8.2, the --install-all additional option will be expanded on-the-fly as -i on all available modules (don’t confuse with -i all: the latter is equivalent to -i base).

interpreter_name

The recipe will automatically create a python interpreter with a session object that can bootstrap OpenERP with a database right away. You can use that for interactive sessions or to launch a script:

$ bin/python_openerp
To start the OpenERP working session, just do:
   session.open()
or
   session.open(db=DATABASE_NAME)
Then you can issue commands such as
   session.registry('res.users').browse(session.cr, 1, 1)

>>>

The interpreter name is python_<part_name> by default; but it can be explicitely set like this:

interpreter_name = my_py

If you want not to have the interpreter, juste do

interpreter_name =

If you want to wrap a python script with such session objects, read OpenERP Scripts and especially Arguments and session. See also openerp_scripts.

Note

this facility is new in version 1.6.0, and tested with OpenERP ≥ 6.1 only for now.

interpreter

With the gtkclient and webclient recipes, this behauves like the interpreter option of zc.recipe.egg: it gives you a Python interpreter in the bin subdirectory of the buildout:

interpreter = erp_python

With the server recipe, the interpreter option will be ignored, because this recipe always creates an interpreter with preloaded objects to bootstrap openerp, and these depend on the configuration. Check interpreter_name for more details.

Options for download and caching strategies

Let us start by listing a few global buildout options (to be put in the [buildout] section), whose scope is much larger than the OpenERP recipe.

eggs-directory:control where eggs are stored after download and/or build and reciprocally acts as a cache.
index:specifies where to get informations about distributions not found in eggs-directory.
find-links:direct URLs to look for distributions
allow-hosts:white list of URL patterns allowed for distributions download. Great to exclude the numerous useless sites that setuptools may want to crawl and which tend to break each time a new version gets referenced on PyPI.

The OpenERP recipes define a few more.

base_url

This option is local to the part.

URL from which to download official and nightly versions (assuming the archive filenames are constistent with those in OpenERP download server). This is a basic mirroring capability:

base_url = http://download.example.com/openerp/

openerp-downloads-directory

This is an option for the [buildout] section

Allows to share OpenERP downloads among several buildouts. You should put this option in your ~/.buildout/default.cfg file. It specifies the destination download directory for OpenERP archives. The path may be absolute or relative to the buildout directory.

Example:

[buildout]
openerp-downloads-directory = /home/user/.buildout/openerp-downloads

Options for release and packaging

Note

release and packaging should be provided by dedicated executables, not by options. These options should disappear at some point between 1.8 and 1.9 versions.

freeze-to

This option is meant to produce an extension buildout configuration that effectively freezes the variable versions and revisions of the current configuration.

Note

supported VCSes for this feature are currently Mercurial, Bazaar and Git (excluding Subversion).

It is meant for release processes, and as such includes some consistency checks to avoid as much as possible issuing a frozen configuration that could be different from what the developper or release manager is assumed to have just tested. Namely:

  • it works only in offline mode (command-line -o flag). This is to avoid fetching new revisions from VCSes or PyPI
  • it fails if some VCS-controlled addons or main software have local modifications, including pending merges.

The recommended way to use it is through the command line (all buildout options can be set this way). Here’s an example, assuming the part is called openerp-server-1:

bin/buildout -o openerp-server-1:freeze-to=frozen.cfg

This produces a buildout configuration file named frozen.cfg, with notably an openerp-server-1 part having a revisions option that freezes everything.

For configurations with several openerp related parts, you can freeze them together or in different files. This gives you flexibility in the distributions you may want to produce from a single configuration file:

bin/buildout -o openerp-server-1:freeze-to=server.cfg openerp-server-2:freeze-to=server.cfg gtkclient:freeze-to=client.cfg

In that latter example, server.cfg will have the two server parts, while client.cfg will have the gtkclient part only.

Note

in DVCSes cases, nothing is done to check that the locally extracted revisions are actually pushed where they should.

Also, if the buildout configuration is itself under version control (a good practice), it is not in the recipe scope to commit or tag it. You are encouraged to use an external release script for that kind of purpose.

Warning

the recipe will also freeze python distributions installed with the gp.vcsdevelop extension but cannot currently protect against local modifications of these.

Warning

currently freeze-to cannot fix eggs versions related to non-openerp parts.

freeze-allow-picked-versions

This option is to be used in conjunction with freeze-to. If set to False, it will add allow-picked-versions = false for zc.buildout versions that support this flag.

Warning

in the current state of things, this can cause problems if you have non-openerp parts (see the various warnings in freeze-to)

extract-downloads-to

Following the same kind of logic as freeze-to, this option allows to turn a buildout that aggregates from various remote sources (tarball downloads, VCSes) into a self-contained buildout archive directory that can be packed for easy distribution.

Note

supported VCSes for this feature are currently Mercurial, Bazaar and Git (excluding Subversion).

Actually it extracts only the downloaded elements into a target directory and issues a buildout configuration with local references only. If that target directory has been itself initialized first with the fixed elements (buildout configuration files, bootstrap scripts, local addons), then it has all the needed elements, except eggs to be downloaded from PyPI or the specified index site.

Here is an example, assuming the fixed elements are themselves versioned with Mercurial:

hg archive ../test-extract && bin/buildout -o openerp:extract-downloads-to=../test-extract

The produced buildout configuration in the target directory is release.cfg. So, for instance, from our test-extract archive, the buildout can be executed like this:

python bootstrap.py && bin/buildout -c release.cfg

or further extended for system-dependent options such as port, db connection, etc.

The extract-downloads-to option can be used for several parts with the same target directory (same as freeze-to).

Furthermore, a default freeze-to is issued, producing a buildout configuration called extracted_from.cfg in the target directory, for later reference (local modification tracking) or a more developper-friendly reproduction configuration (ready-made setup to derive bugfix branches from).

This implication of freeze-to also has the side effect to enforce the same rules with respect to uncommitted changes.

Python distributions managed with gp.vcsdevelop are taken into account.