Configuring ZSyncer

• Destinations: Valid ZSyncers to sync to, including port. For example: http://www.myzopesite.com:8080/my_ZSyncer. These can be https urls if you want. If your destination is a ZEO cluster, you should only give the address for a single zope server in the cluster, or just give the virtual address presented by your load balancer if you have one.
• Connection Type: the underlying transport classes to use. ConnectionMgr works with SSL and supports timeouts. Our ZPublisher.Client code does neither. Therefore, ConnectionMgr is now preferred.
• Use Relative Paths: Force ZSyncer to treat object paths as relative to its parent container, not relative to the zope root. This means that the source and destination zsyncers can live in different parts of the heirarchy, and objects will be pushed where you expect them relative to the destination zsyncer. It also prevents you from syncing anything above the source syncer's container.

  Note that this flag MUST currently be set the same way on both the source and destination servers. If the settings do not match, you may have problems. This requirement may be removed in a future release.

• Log?: Turns on logging
• Logfile: specify the file to log to
• Approval?: Logs the person who synced this, plus comments and approver's name
• Override?: if checked, ZSyncer will sync with the user specified below. Otherwise, will default to the current user.
• User: username to use when override is checked
• Password: password to use when override is checked
• Syncable types: what meta types you want to sync. See below for info.
• Additional syncable types: if you want some types to be syncable and they do not show in the "Syncable types" list, you can type them here, one per line.
• Non-syncable meta types: types to explicitly remove from the list of syncable types. These are applied last and will override any previously added types.

How to sync

The sync web page shows the difference between a development Zope and one or more other Zopes. It does this by comparing the date stamps on the objects in Zope.

• File: shows the object name in Zope. If this object is a folder, you can click on it to traverse to the lower folder.
• Status: shows the status of the object in relation between the Zopes it will be one of the following terms:
  • ok (green): this object is present on both production and development and is in sync
  • missing (red): this object is present development but not production, it needs syncing
  • extra this (red): object is on production but not development, it needs deleting from production
  • out of date (orange): this object is present on both the production and development, but has been changed on development, it needs syncing.
• View: takes you to a version on the appropriate server
• Action: perform the highlighted action
  • sync: moves the relevant object from the development server to all the production servers
  • delete: removes the relevant object from all the production servers, development servers are unaffected
  • diff: if this object has a document_src you can do a diff on it. If your ZSyncer has more than one destination, only the first is used for the diff.

Syncable types:

• This should be considered experimental, but it sort of limits the objects that can be synced. You specify the meta types and only objects of that type are shown.
• However if your list of syncable objects is different between boxes, this could generate false results. For example, the source has Foo in its syncable types, but the destination doesn't. If that's the case, an object of type Foo that is on both systems will be shown as missing on the destination, because it is filtered from the destination object list. Similarly, if Foo is syncable on the destination but not on the source system, an object of type Foo that is on both systems will be shown as extra on the destination because it is filtered from the source object list.
• Also if you sync a folderish object, all the objects in it are moved, not just the syncable types. This is because of the way Zope generates export files.
• Let me know if this makes it a mess.

Notes

If you sync a folder, it will sync all the items in that folder.

Versions are respected; if you have made changes in a version they will not be synced until committed. (But of course Versions are evil and you should use them with care.)

If you change an object in a folder, that folder does not become out of date. However if you add or delete objects the immediate parent folder becomes out of date. This is due to the way Folders are implemented in the ZODB.