Tarek have made some great works on collective.releaser and collective.dist the last months. There is currently a refactor branch.
The goal of collective.releaser is to normalize the release process of a buildout based project.
I've worked on it the last week to implement the latest needed steps to allow an easy way to release a buildout project.
So here is how it works. collective.releaser came with a paster template to generate a buildout skel. You got a dev.cfg for development with a develop option with all your develop eggs in it and a prod.cfg for production without develop and all versions fixed in the versions section.
I've modified the project_release so you just need to run:
$ bin/project_release --version=1.0
This will release eggs founded in the dev.cfg's develop option on a pypi server and fix the versions in buildout.cfg. If no version is founded for an egg in the versions section of the prod.cfg then the egg is released at the version passed to the command line. If a version is founded then the egg is released at this version. Here is an example:
The dev.cfg:
[buildout]
parts = eggs
develop =
../collective.releaser
../my.project
[eggs]
recipe = zc.recipe.egg
eggs =
collective.releaser
my.project
The prod.cfg:
[buildout]
parts = eggs
versions = versions
[versions]
collective.releaser=0.6.1
[eggs]
recipe = zc.recipe.egg
eggs =
collective.releaser
my.project
collective.releaser package is already at 0.6.1 so no release is needed. my.project as no versions specified so a new 1.0 release is generated and uploaded on your pypi server.
The generated buildout.cfg will look like this:
[buildout]
extends = prod.cfg
versions = versions
[versions]
collective.releaser=0.6.1
my.project=1.0
After all eggs are released, project_release will generate a tarball with the tagged version of the project and all eggs founded in the develop option.
Then to upgrade your project you just need to untar the archive on your production server. Launch bin/buildout. And that's it.
This will probably make life easier for developers ! Hope we can make a new self generated release soon :)