Plone.ansible playbook: load a custom Data.fs

Plone Support
1

I'm looking through the Plone ansible playbook docs and I'm not seeing a way to load a existing Data.fs file at deployment. This would allow me to load an existing site and "pre-populate" it with data from the previous site. Being able to do this with the blob data would be useful as well.

2

In the meantime I'll see how far I can get with making use of hexagonit.recipe.download

I certainly can unpack the data I want using something like this:
Adding this to roles/plone.plone_server/templates/buildout.cfg.j2 is my current solution.

parts =

...
getit

[getit]
recipe = hexagonit.recipe.download
url = https://url/for/mysite/data/mysite.data.tar.gz
destination = ${buildout:directory}

Just working out how to ensure that it only runs the first time (maybe an additional playbook file similar to the way that firewall.yml is used)

3

Hi David,

You could customize the ansible.plone_server role to do this, instead of letting buildout handle it. For example, the lines following - name: Copy buildout skeleton show you how to copy an entire directory structure from the local host to the remote host. However, since the role-defined var directory is separate from the buildout root (typically, /var/local/plone-x.y/zeoserver/ versus /usr/local/plone-x.y/zeoserver/), you'll want separate tasks for your Data.fs and blobstorage. Also, since these files could be fairly large, it's probably better to move tarballs across the wire. The copy module can take a very long time if there are lots of files in the folder tree.

Which leads you to the task - name: Load buildout cache from host file. Here's an example:

- name: Load Data.fs file
  when: not db_status.stat.exists
  unarchive:
    creates="{{ plone_instance_var_path }}/filestorage/Data.fs"
    src="Data.fs.tgz"
    dest="{{ plone_instance_var_path }}/filestorage"
    owner=plone_daemon
    group=plone_group

If you put a Data.fs.tgz file in the role's files directory, it will be extracted in {{ plone_instance_var_path }}/filestorage (and the task will be skipped if a Data.fs file exists there already). Or look at - name: Download buildout cache if needed if you want the tarball to be downloaded from another host.

See also:
http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/unarchive_module.html
http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/copy_module.html
http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/get_url_module.html

4

@fulv,
Thanks for the pointers. This looks like a good direction. It also looks like something that could be added to the standard plone_server role in the future.