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# Deployment

Release: | 0.1
Date: | June 12, 2010

After developing a Camelot application comes the need to deploy the application, eather at a central location or in a distributed setup.

## Building .egg files

Whatever the deployment setup is, it is almost always a good idea to distribute your application as a single .egg file, containing as much as possible the dependencies that are likely to change often during the lifetime of the application. Resource files (like icons or templates can be included in this .egg file as well).

Building .egg files is a relatively straightforward process using setuptools

A setup.py file for building an .egg of your application could look like this:

    from setuptools import setup, find_packages

    setup(
      name = 'movie store',
      version = '01.01',
      description = 'Movie Store',
      author = 'Conceptive Engineering',
      author_email = 'project-camelot@conceptive.be',
      url = 'www.conceptive.be',
      include_package_data = True,
      packages = find_packages(),
      py_modules =  ['settings'] )

Which is then build using this command:

    python -O setup.py bdist_egg --exclude-source-files

The setup.py script above includes settings.py in the .egg file. This is prefered if the settings.py file is going to be the same for all deployments. (Eg.: the database is on a central server accessible for all) In some occasions it might be better not to include the settings.py file into the .egg file, and only put it in your PYTHONPATH at deployment time.

Note

The advantage of using .egg files comes when updating the application, simply replacing a single .egg file at a central location is enough to migrate all your users to the new version.

## Linux deployment

The application can be launched by putting the .egg in the PYTHONPATH and starting python with the -m option:

    export PYTHONPATH = /mnt/r/movie_store-01.01-py2.5.egg
    python.exe -m movie_store.main

## Windows deployment

### Using .egg files

First of all python needs to be available on the machines that are going to run the application. Notice that for python to be available, it not necessarily needs to be installed on every machine that runs the application. Installing python on a shared disk of a central server might just be enough.

Don’t forget to install the needed binary libraries as well, like PyQt, PIL.

Also put the .egg file on a shared drive.

Then, the easiest way to proceed is to put a little .vbs bootstrap script on the shared drive and put shortcuts to it on the desktops of the users. The .vbs script can look like this:

    Set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
    WshShell.Environment("Process").item("PYTHONPATH") = "R:\movie_store-01.01-py2.5.egg;"
    WshShell.Run """R:\Python2.5\pythonw.exe"" -m movie_store.main"

### Creating installers

When the application needs to be installed at a variety of sites and circumstances, or it needs to be downloadable as a package, it might be needed to build a real windows installer. This can be done using a combination of py2exe and InnoSetup.

The commercial release of Camelot includes a script that builds an installer from a Camelot application.

### Navigation

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