Plone buildout in Windows – this is how

Having recently moved to a new laptop for development I realised when trying to reinstall Plone and get buildouts working again it is not in fact such a simple task. Python and it’s libraries are all built with Visual Studio 2003 (we have 2008 doh!) and it is not friendly with newer versions.

Therefore this is how to create a proper and working plone distribution in Windows with buildout functionality.

Firstly download and install Python 2.4.4 here and Python Extensions for Windows here and install them both (this is the ‘non plone’ instance of python)

Download and install the Plone Windows installer (we used 3.1.7) here . Follow the steps in my previous post up until the buildout stage (as this is where it will fail currently as we have no Visual Studio 2003). 

Now download GCC for Windows here and install, ensure you tick the correct boxes during install and it should find the ‘non plone’ instance of python we installed earlier. If you go to your command prompt after this you should be able to type gcc and it will spit some output from the compiler.

Now browse to you ‘non plone’ instance of python and copy all the files over your plone instance of python (in my case C:\Plone3\python).

Your buildout should be working correctly now as it will be using MingW to compile the libraries instead of visual studio and all the required libraries are now present.

Setting up SSL headers in IIS 7

So this week I have been busy helping our tech migrate our sites to the new 8 core beast. I have to admit at first I hated IIS7 but it’s since grown on me and I can now start to see it’s advantages and easier configuration once you know what you are doing.

SSL certificates are much easier to install however setting header bindings is still a command prompt job.
We use a wildcard certificate for all our corporate subsites on a single IP which means we need to set these bindings so IIS knows how to distinguish between https requests.

Here is how to do it. First install the certificate in your IIS root (click the server name and then the server certificates icon).

No add the certificate manually through IIS to your first site (I used www.mydomain.com). To do this right click and go edit bindings on the site.

Now go to your command prompt and navigate to %windir%\system32\inetsrv directory.

For each site other than the one you just added using the ssl certificate you now need to run this command.

appcmd set site /site.name:”MYSITENAME” /+bindings.[protocol=’https’,bindingInformation=’100.100.100.1:443:subdomain.mysite.com’]Replace the IP with either a * or the ip you wish to limit your connectivity to. replace subdomain.mysite.com with you site’s url and the MYSITENAME with the name of the site in IIS.

 

You’re done. 🙂 If it’s not working check that the sites you have just added via cmd have the correct SSL certificate selected (the drop down isn’t blank in IIS). If it is you stuffed up the first step and need to remove all the bindings again and start over.