How do I use easy_install and buildout when pypi is down?

Question

I am using buildout to automatically download and setup the many dependencies of my Plone installation. buildout more or less uses easy_install to download and install a bunch o

Answer 1

In case of zc.buildout: use its local download caching features. There are mostly three things to cache:

• external extends, i.e. http://dist.plone.org/release/4.1.2/versions.cfg
• eggs from some distserver, i.e. pypi
• downloads from zc.recipe.cmmi or similar recipes using the download infrastructure provided by zc.buildout

For all three we need to tweak the global configuration and set a cache folder for the extends and one for eggs and other downloads.

In your home folder create a .buildout folder.

In this folder create the folders extends-cache and downloads

In .buildout create a file default.cfg with:

[buildout]  
extends-cache = /home/USERNAME/.buildout/extends-cache 
download-cache = /home/USERNAME/.buildout/downloads

so you have:

.buildout/
├── default.cfg
├── downloads
└── extends-cache

Thats it. Make sure to not override these two variables from default.cfg in your specific buildout. After first successful run of buildout subsequent runs are running in offline mode ./bin/buildout -o.

As a side effect buildout is much faster if used in offline mode, i.e. when no new downloads are expected but some configuration changed

Beside this it makes sense to run your own pypi-mirror. As another source of information you might be interested in the article I wrote some time ago about this topic: http://bluedynamics.com/articles/jens/setup-z3c.pypimirror