Buildout configuration

Before going into more details, let’s have briefly a look at a buildout.cfg configuration. Each section of the configuration file are called parts in buildout slang. The part configures a directive to run using a recipe. There are many recipes you can lookup, but in a buildout.cfg freshly baked by buildstrap, you’ll only see two:

• zc.recipe.egg: which takes care of downloading and installing dependencies into the self-contained environment ;
• gp.vcsdevelop: which parses a requirements.txt file and exposes the dependencies, so zc.recipe.egg can do its job (in the context of buildstrap).

Then, to setup the environment, there’s a section named [buildout] that contains everything needed to setup the self contained environment, like the list of parts to run (remove one from there and it’ll be ignored), the paths to the used directories…

Once the buildout configuration file, buildout.cfg has been generated, you can tweak it as much as you like to suit your needs. Buildout is much more than just setting up a self contained environment!

If you want to read more about buildout, check its documentation, or for more in depth info, check buildout.cfg manual.