Setting up Plone locally for development

I've been tinkering around with the Plone Rest API for a while now and noticed, I can not only do API calls on localhost:8080 but, on the browser can run Plone. So to check for issues can I use this setup as reference or is there currently an updated branch for Plone separate? Does it use the latest version of Plone?

Sorry if I seem a noob here, being a JavaScript developer I've been used to cloning repos and following a few steps in the readme.md to run the local deployment. So I feel a Developer Crash Course (Building a developer crash course (training)) would really help!

Hi @ajayns, a crash course for frontend developers would be nice indeed. But his will need some time to finish.

I guess you can find good stuff in the angular-sdk https://training.plone.org/5/angular/index.html training from the last conference, but it seems missing the setup part of Plone as it uses the prebuild heroku version.

I'm not sure if I unstand your quest right. You have a running Plone already or not?
The REST-API is just enother way to talk to Plone there is currently also always the default UI of plone at the same port, you can use with your Browser to inspect and manage Content or create models for the backend you can then use by your Angular-APP. This is Part of the Angular training mentioned above.

But fortunately it not hart to install Plone:
https://docs.plone.org/manage/installing/index.html explains some options.
You can also use the bobtemplates.plone packages to create a local dev environment.
https://github.com/plone/bobtemplates.plone/blob/master/docs/buildout.rst
The plonecli package provides this too, but I need to make a new release to fix some problems with this bobtemplate. It is still alpha and need some more work. But you can always use bobtemplates.plone directly, use the UnifiedInstaller or just use a simple buildout as a starting point, as explaint in the first link above.

I have setup the REST Api locally. Pointing the browser at localhost:8080 loads Plone.
So I was wondering if this is the latest version of Plone and if I can develop or find issues in Plone based on this version installed.

Okay thanks, that helps a lot! I'll also explore the REST API documentation (REST API — plone.restapi v8.24.2.dev0)

Will this check this out too! Thanks a lot for the fast reply!

It depends which version of Plone you have installed.
Just check your buildout configuration files for something like this:

extends =
    https://dist.plone.org/release/5.1-latest/versions.cfg

But I would suggest to go with 5.1 already.
It is stable enought and has some fixes which are not in Plone 5.0 Versions.

These are the sequence of steps I followed:

checkout https://github.com/plone/plone.restapi
setup python virtualenv

python bootstrap.py
bin/buildout -Nv -c plone-5.0.x.cfg

Would changing that to plone-5.1.x.cfg be good enough to update to the latest?

Yes changing the URL and rerun buildout is enough :wink:

And when you start Plone, there might be one action needed. Go to the Sitesetup and run the upgrade.

@mrtango Thanks a bunch for the help, it worked and I'm running the latest version of Plone.

In the plone.restapi repo, we were working on PRs for adding docs for installation and exploration with postman. So shouldn't it be using the latest version of Plone? So we'll need to be adding:

bin/buildout -Nv -c plone-5.1.x.cfg

Instead of plone-5.0.x.cfg right? Referring to PR (https://github.com/plone/plone.restapi/pull/488)

@tisto @tulikavijay Opinions?

@ajayns @tulikavijay thanks for the docs so far. I have been looking for the docs and didn't able find it earlier.

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@MrTango @ajayns i'll make the changes if its the latest stable version..