Setting up a zope instance, symlinking to all the products, extracting product tarballs, copying over a snapshot Data.fs from the customer's website, restarting zope, clicking around in the quickinstaller: it can all be done by hand.

Instancemanager is a handy utility program that manages your development zope instances:

• Creates clean, fresh instances in your standard location.
• Copies over a prepared Data.fs if desirec.
• Makes products available in the Products/ directory from a variety of sources (.tgz, .tgz bundles, svn, symlinking).
• Restarts your zope and reinstalls your products.
• Does the Data.fs copy, the product availability and the reinstall in one step, giving you a real fresh instance without leftover junk.

If you're the kind of good developers that's also a lazy developer, you don't want to do this repetitive stuff by hand. That's where the instance manager jumps in. instancemanager yourproject create creates an instance in your default location. instancemanager yourproject fresh gives you a freshly prepared products directory, a freshly copied pre-made Data.fs (if you've got one) and it presses the quickinstaller buttons you want pressed.

For instance, individual product sources can be:

• A .tgz file (like FCKeditor or qGoogleSitemaps).
• A .tgz bundle (like plone or ploneformmailer).
• A symlink (most probably to an svn directory, for instance your current customer development product).
• A symlink to a bundle directory (most probably an svn bundle, for instance the latest plone 2.5).

Configuration is handled in a layered manner. Instancemanager has it's own defaults. You can overwrite these global defaults locally ("I always store my instances in my homedir instead of ~/instances/ "). And there's an per-project config file where you can list exceptions. And of course the passwords and desired products and so.