I had a similar question about backups and how to use them without buildout, this is probably of interest to you https://community.plone.org/t/backup-without-buildout/
Also my post here Cookiecutter zope instance and ZEO - #10 by Esoth where I use cookiecutter as a sort of replacement for setting up config files and then use to create a script, somewhat analogous to what collective.recipe.backup was doing with buildout