Services/Sync/Server/ReleaseProcess

Background

Python uses a built-in packaging system that allows packages to get installed in a specific folder called "site-packages", loaded at Python startup. Several installers exists for this. One of them being Python itself.

You can also specify arbitrary folders when a Python application starts, making it possible to group Python packages an application uses in a specific location.

To go further, virtualenv allows you to create a new Python interpreter copied from the main one. This creates an isolated Python environment somewhere on your system. In other words, every package that will be installed by a Python interpreter created by virtualenv, will be installed under a specific tree and not interfer with the main Python installation.

Ideally, the Weave application should be installed in a virtualenv-ed Python in /var/sync for example.

Weave application structure

The Weave application we are building will be organized in three parts

• an .ini file used by the application to start up. It contains all the configuration needed by the weave server, like the location of the DB, etc.
• a .wsgi file used by Apache to run the application
• some Python packages. Right now just one called "weave.server"

Proposal

XXX see zamboni process (repo based) http://github.com/jbalogh/zamboni-lib/tree/master/packages http://jbalogh.github.com/zamboni/topics/packages/

One simple way to release the weave server is to create a source distribution with all the packages and the ini file, for each version.

This distribution can be installed by the Ops using a distutils-compatible installer like Pip, or the built-in installer Python provides.

The ini file is installed in /etc/sync.ini and the packages in Python's site-packages, together with the .wsgi file.

Release process

Steps to prepare a release:

• run "python setup.py test" to check all tests pass
• tag the version in HG
• run "python setup.py sdist mozupload"

These steps create a .tar.gz release (done by "sdist") and is placed into a shared folder all servers can see (done by "mozupload".)

Installation

Steps to install a release on a server:

• run "pip install path/to/realase/WeaveServer1.1.4.tgz"
• restart apache (or hot restart mode with apache)