Installation

Description

Installation instructions for Plone for various operating systems and situations.

Introduction

This document covers the basics of installing Plone on popular operating systems. It will also point you to other documents for more complex or demanding installations.

Plone runs as an application on the Zope application server. That server is installed automatically by the install process.

Warning

We strongly advise against installing Plone via OS package or port. There is no .rpm, .deb, or BSD port that is supported by the Plone community. Plone dependencies can and should be installed via package or port -- but not Plone itself.

Download Plone

Plone is available for Microsoft Windows, Mac OSX X, Linux and BSD operating systems.

Download the latest Plone release.

Binary installers are available for Windows and OS X. Installation on Linux, BSD and other Unix workalikes requires a source code installation, made easy by our Unified Installer. "Unified" refers to its ability to install on most Unix workalikes.

Plone installation requirements

See Plone installation requirements for detailed requirements.

How to install Plone

Plone can run on all popular desktop or server operating systems, including Linux, OS X, BSD and Microsoft Windows.

  • You can install Plone on a server for production usage
  • You can install Plone locally on your own computer for development and test drive

Ubuntu / Debian

We describe Ubuntu/Debian installation in detail as an example of installation on a common Unix workalike. The only difference for most other systems would be in package-manager commands and package names. See Plone installation requirements for package names and commands on other platforms.

Installing Plone using the Unified UNIX Installer

Note

This is the recommended method for a development or evaluation installation of Plone on a Unix workalike. For a production installation, Installing Plone for Production on Ubuntu is a much better guide.

This recipe is good for:

  • Plone development and testing on Ubuntu / Debian
  • Operating system installations where you have administrator (root) access. Note that root access is not strictly necessary as long as you have required software installed beforehand on the server, but this tutorial assumes you need to install the software yourself and you are the admin. If you don't have the ability to install system libraries, you'll need to get your sysadmin to do it for you. The libraries required are in common use.

The resulting installation is self-contained, does not touch system files, and is safe to play with (no root/sudoing is needed).

If you are not familiar with UNIX operating system command line you might want to study this Linux shell tutorial first.

For information on using this installation with more advanced production hosting environments and deployments, see the deployment guide.

Instructions are tested for the Ubuntu 14.04 Long Term Support release.

Install the operating system software and libraries needed to run Plone 
sudo apt-get install python-setuptools python-dev build-essential libssl-dev libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev libbz2-dev libjpeg62-dev libz-dev

You will probably also want these optional system packages (see Plone manual for more information): 

sudo apt-get install libreadline-dev wv poppler-utils

Note

libreadline-dev is only necessary if you wish to build your own python rather than use your system's python 2.7.

If you're planning on developing with Plone, install git version control support: 

sudo apt-get install git

Note

If sudo command is not recognized or does not work you don't have administrator rights to Ubuntu / Debian operating system. Please contact your server vendor or consult the operating system support forum.

Note

If you still use Ubuntu 12.04 you do not need libz-dev.

Download the latest Plone unified installer

Download from the plone.org download page to your server using wget command. Curl also works. Substitute the latest version number for 4.3.6 in the instructions below. 

wget --no-check-certificate https://launchpad.net/plone/4.3/4.3.6/+download/Plone-4.3.6-UnifiedInstaller.tgz
Run the Plone installer in standalone mode 
# Extract the downloaded file
#
tar -xf Plone-4.3.6-UnifiedInstaller.tgz
#
# Go the folder containing installer script
#
cd Plone-4.3.6-UnifiedInstaller
#
# Run script
./install.sh standalone

install.sh has many options, use:

./install.sh --help

to discover them.

The default admin credentials will be printed to the console. You can change this password after logging in to the Zope Management Interface.

Note

The password is also written down in the buildout.cfg file, but this setting is not effective after Plone has been started for the first time. Changing this setting does not do any good.

Install the Plone developer tools

If you're using this Plone install for development, add the common development tool set. 

cd ~/Plone/zinstance
bin/buildout -c develop.cfg

You'll need to add the "-c develop.cfg" again each time you run buildout, or you'll lose the extra development tools.

Start Plone

If you're developing, start Plone in foreground mode for a test run (you'll see potential errors in the console): 

cd ~/Plone/zinstance
bin/plonectl fg

When you start Plone in the foreground, it runs in debug mode, which is much slower than production mode since it reloads templates for every request.

For evaluation, instead use:

cd ~/Plone/zinstance
bin/plonectl start

Use

cd ~/Plone/zinstance
bin/plonectl stop

to stop the instance.

By default, Plone will listen to port 8080 on available network interfaces. That may be changed by editing buildout.cfg and re-running buildout.

You've got Plone

Now take a look at your Plone site by visiting the following address in your webbrowser: 

http://yourserver:8080

The greeting page will let you create a new site. For this you need the login credentials printed to your terminal earlier, also available at ~/Plone/zinstance/adminPassword.txt.

If everything is OK, press CTRL-C in the terminal to stop Plone if you're running in debug mode. Use the plonectl stop command if you didn't start in debug mode.

If you have problems, please see the help guidelines.

For automatic start-up when your server boots up, init scripts, etc. please see the deployment guide.

Installing Plone using buildout on Ubuntu / Debian

Note

This part of the documentation is outdated, even if ZopeSkel still may work it is not considered best practice anymore. Please only follow the steps below is you know what you are doing.

Here are quick instructions to install Plone using a pre-installed buildout and the OS-provided Python interpreter. This procedure is only useful if you know buildout well enough to tailor your own buildout configuration.

You need to manage dependencies (Python, libxml, Pillow) yourself.

This will:

  • create a default buildout.cfg configuration file and folder structure around it;
  • automatically download and install all packages from pypi.python.org;
  • configure Plone and Zope for you.

  1. Install virtualenv for python (on Ubuntu): 

    sudo apt-get install python-virtualenv

  2. Create a virtualenv where you can install some Python packages (ZopeSkel, Pillow): 

    virtualenv plone-virtualenv

  3. In this virtualenv install ZopeSkel (from the release 2 series): 

    source plone-virtualenv/bin/activate
easy_install "ZopeSkel<2.99"

  4. Create Plone buildout project using ZopeSkel: 

    paster create -t plone4_buildout myplonefolder

  5. Optionally edit buildout.cfg at this point. Run buildout (use Python 2.6 for Plone 4.1): 

    python2.6 bootstrap.py
bin/buildout

More info:

Installing Plone using RPMs, .dev, ... packages

See the Preparing the Server section of the Deployment guide for a list of system packages needed to install Plone. General instructions are otherwise the same as for Debian-style systems.

Microsoft Windows

Installing Plone on Windows

By far the easiest way to install on Windows is to use the binary installer provided on plone.org. This installation is adequate for Python development. It is very rare to need C language extensions.

If you have needs beyond those met by the Windows Installer, read on.

For Plone 4.1 and later, see these instructions:

If you wish to develop Plone on Windows you need to set-up a working MingW environment (this can be somewhat painful if you aren't used to it)

OSX

Installing Plone using OSX binary installer

This is the recommended method if you want to try Plone for the first time.

Please use the installer from the download page https://plone.org/products/plone/releases.

The binary installer is intended to provide an environment suitable for testing, evaluating, and developing theme and add-on packages. It will not give you the ability to add or develop components that require a C compiler. This is very rarely needed.

Installing Plone from source on OS X

Installation via the Unified Installer or buildout is very similar to Unix. However, you will need to install a command-line build environment. To get a free build kit from Apple, do one of the following:

  • Download gcc and command-line tools from https://developer.apple.com/downloads/. This will require an Apple developer id.
  • Install Xcode from the App Store. After installation, visit the Xcode app's preference panel to download the command-line tools.

After either of these steps, you immediately should be able to install Plone using the Unified Installer.

Proceed as with Linux.

LibXML2/LibXSLT Versions

If you are installing Plone 4.2+ or 4.1 with Diazo, you will need up-to-date versions of libxml2 and libxslt: 

LIBXML2 >= "2.7.8"
LIBXSLT >= "1.1.26"

Ideally, install these via system packages or ports. If that's not possible, use most current version of the z3c.recipe.staticlxml buildout recipe to build an lxml (Python wrapper) egg with static libxml2 and libxslt components.

Don't worry about this if you're using an installer.

Entering debug mode after installation

When you have Plone installed and want to start development you need do enter debug mode.