When using Plone with buildout you want to be able to reproduce your environment with the same set of eggs, even if there were some new releases in between.

buildout 2.x

For buildout 2.x they implemented a lot of improvements for pinning versions.

  • allow-picked-versions allow buildout to download pinned packages only. Not pinned but required packages will raise an Exception.
  • show-picked-versions shows a summary of picked versions after your first buildout run. You can copy'n'paste this into a versions.cfg file.

buildout 1.x

Manually

Without pinning your eggs it will be impossible to reproduce the deployed buildout configuration in future. Use a this buildout extension for future projects to avoid this pitfall:

$ cd ~/sandbox/your_buildout_directory
$ echo "[versions]" > versions.cfg
$ bin/buildout -N -vvv | grep '^Picked' | sed 's/Picked: //' >> versions.cfg
  • -N and/or -o avoids buildout from downloading new packages.
  • Use -vvv to increase verbosity
  • Use grep to finds all occurrences of Picked: ... in output
  • Use sed to strip away the Picked: string part
  • Use >> to append to this file

After running this command you should add the just generated versions.cfg file to your existing buildout configuration as shown:

[buildout]
...
extends =
    versions.cfg
    ...
versions = versions
...

buildout.dumppickedversions

buildout.dumppickedversions is a buildout extension that prints or generates a versions.cfg file with all not pinned eggs. You should use this on all your future buildouts:

[buildout]
extensions =
    ...
    buildout.dumppickedversions

dump-picked-versions-file = versions.cfg
...