Install Plone 4.3.3 on Ubuntu

This tutorial assumes your Ubuntu installation is fresh. You may already have completed some of the steps below.

Prerequisits

First, SSH into your Ubuntu server.

Secondly, ensure your package manager's indexes are up to date:

apt-get update

Thirdly, Install the various packages and programs that Plone relies on in order to install and run:

apt-get install build-essential gcc libjpeg-dev readline-common libssl-dev libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev

Wait for all of those to finish, confirming with the "Y" key as required.

Downloading Plone 4.3.3

First we need to get hold of the latest version of Plone, to do that head to www.plone.org/download which will redirect you to the latest available version. At this time of writing it is: https://launchpad.net/plone/4.3/4.3.3/+download/Plone-4.3.3-UnifiedInstaller.tgz.

Secondly, create a directory to install Plone to, (execute the command below) - we are going to put Plone in our /usr/local/ folder

mkdir /usr/local/plone 

Make sure you are in that directory:

cd /usr/local/plone

Now that we are in the folder we need to be, we are going to use wget to pull down the file. Run this command (you will need to modify the URL seen after the command with the one you obtained in the steps above, unless you want Plone 4.3.3 that is):

wget https://launchpad.net/plone/4.3/4.3.3/+download/Plone-4.3.3-UnifiedInstaller.tgz

Now that the tgz file has been downloaded, we need to extract it.

tar -xzf Plone-4.3.3-UnifiedInstaller.tgz

Installing Plone 4.3.3

There is a shell script in the folder we extracted earlier named install.sh which will take care of the Plone installation for us. In order to see what options we have, you can run the following command:

./install.sh -h

Which will give us output similar to the following:

Usage: [sudo] install.sh [options] standalone|zeo

Install methods available:
   standalone - install standalone zope instance
   zeo        - install zeo cluster

Use sudo (or run as root) for server-mode install.

Options (see top of install.sh for complete list):
--password=InstancePassword
  If not specified, a random password will be generated.

--target=pathname
  Use to specify top-level path for installs. Plone instances
  and Python will be built inside this directory
  (default is /usr/local/Plone)

--clients=client-count
  Use with the zeo install method to specify the number of Zope
  clients you wish to create. Default is 2.

--instance=instance-name
  Use to specify the name of the operating instance to be created.
  This will be created inside the target directory unless there's
  a slash in the specification.
  Default is 'zinstance' for standalone, 'zeocluster' for ZEO.

--user=user-name
  In a server-mode install, sets the effective user for running the
  instance. Default is 'plone'. Ignored for non-server-mode installs.

--with-python=/fullpathtopython2.6
  If you have an already built Python that's adequate to run
  Zope / Plone, you may specify it here.
  virtualenv will be used to isolate the copy used for the install.

As you can see you can customise a fair amount of things regarding the installation, we're going to use the defaults except for --password and --target (we will set a password for the admin account so you can easily log into the Zope database later, although I will explain how to attain it if you do not use this option).

So now execute:

./install.sh --target=/usr/local/plone --password=A_PASSWORD_OF_YOUR_CHOICE

Now wait until the installation is finished and you have successfully installed Plone!

Starting Plone

To start Plone so you can connect to it and create your sites, run (from the /usr/local/plone folder):

bin/plonectl start 

Clean Up

We no longer need the installation files for Plone (although you can keep them if you wish for easier installs later). To remove them run (again fro the /usr/local/plone folder):

rm -rf Plone-4.3.3*