A new recipe has been added to the iw.recipe.* family: iw.recipe.backup.

If you use zc.buildout to deploy Python applications in production, this one can be used to backup a buildout folder, before any upgrade is attempted, or for a daily backup. It creates an archive with a timestamp on its name, in a defined folder, with the whole folder content. Some directories can be excluded if needed.

This script is not doing fine-grained backups of the Data.fs like repozo.py does, but can be combined with it if this finesse is required. The recipe creates two scripts in the bin folder: backup and restore.

backup creates an archive and takes no parameters, whereas restore takes an archive name and decompress it into the buildout folder. The latter does a backup before it decompresses the archive for more safety.

Last, it will raise an error if the backup folder is located within the buildout folder ;), and logs all commands into a log file. This is a tiny recipe, but provides a simple way to backup your buildouts in a single call, no matter the platform you are in.

Other recipes we provide at this time are:
- iw.recipe.cmd: provides a way to execute shell calls, or inline Python calls. This is useful when you need to set a few things when a buildout is built, that does not worth creating a new recipe; - iw.recipe.fetcher: similar to wget. We use it to build python-win32.zip archive, to get all installers on the web; - iw.recipe.fss: will let you configure FileSystemStorage, so no extra step is required; - iw.recipe.pound: compiles Pound load balancer, and creates its configuration file, so it can be run directly; - iw.recipe.sendmail: set zope.sendmail as the default mail sender in a Zope 2-based application. This is useful if you wish to have a fast and robust mailhost service in your Plone sites; - iw.recipe.squid: This recipe installs all parts needed to run a Squid server dedicated to serve a Zope application, staying friendly with Apache and setting things nicely for Plone; - iw.recipe.subversion: recipe to checkout a svn location into a part. It is different from infrae.subversion because it creates a tarball out of the subversion checkout, and put it in the downloads folder. In other words, it works offline as well as long as the tarball was built once. It doesn't have the nice feature infrae.subversion provides which is a code checker that will raise an error when buildout tries to remove a changed file. But as we use the develop feature of buildout to create our code, we didn't need that feature. Subversion checkouts are useful to us when we want to use a bleeding-edge version of a third-party package that has not been released yet; - iw.recipe.template: this one provides a way to write files based on Cheetah templates, like Python Paste does, and is useful for micro-needs, like iw.recipe.cmd.

If you use one of those recipes and whish to make a feature request or a bug report, I have created a new space on plone.org to have a bug tracker for all recipes: http://plone.org/products/iw-recipes/issues