Wingware Python IDE

Introduction

The instructions below are for the Plone 4 unified installer. If you are using an older version of Plone or use a source installation of Plone 4 that makes use of old style Products name space merging, please refer instead to the instructions for Using Wing IDE with Zope.

Configuring your Project

To set up your project, simply set the Main Debug File in Project Properties to the file zinstance/bin/instance within your Plone installation. Wing will read the sys.path updates from that file so that it can find your Plone modules.

For Plone 4, do not use the Zope2 support in Project Properties under the Extensions tab. This no longer works and is not needed unless your Plone installation still uses old style Product name space merging.

Debugging with WingDBG

There are two ways to configure debugging. The method described in this sub-section uses a Zope control panel to turn debugging on and off and will debug only requests to a particular debug port. This is the most common way in which Plone is debugged with Wing IDE.

To get debugging working install WingDBG, the Wing debugger product, from zope/WingDBG-4.1.3.tar in your Wing installation by unpacking it into zinstance/products. Then edit your etc/zope.conf to change enable-product-installation off at the end to instead read enable-product-installation on. Finally, click on the bug icon in the lower left of the IDE window and turn on Enable Passive Listen so the debugger listens for connections initiated from the outside.

Then start Plone and go into the Zope Management Interface from http://localhost:8080/ , click on Control Panel, and then on Wing Debug Service at the bottom. From here you can turn on debugging. The bug icon in lower left of Wing IDE's window should turn green after a while and then any page loads via port 50080 (http://localhost:50080/) will be debugged and will reach breakpoints. This port and other debugger options are configurable from the WingDBG control panel.

products = ${buildout:directory}/products

products /path/to/your/products''

paster create -t plone Products.WingDBG

Debugging Plone from the IDE

It is also possible to debug Plone without WingDBG by launching Plone directly from the IDE. This technique may be more convenient in some cases, and debugs all requests to the Plone instance (not just those on a special debug port). However, it takes more effort to set up and requires modifying the Plone sources.

To debug this way, set zinstance/bin/instance in your Plone installation as the Main Debug File in Project Properties (this should already be done from configuring your project earlier). Then right click on the file in the editor or Project view, select Properties, and set Run Arguments under the Debug tab to fg.

Then open the file zope2instance/ctl.py and change the AdjustedZopeCmd.doforeground method by adding the following code before the last if/else block:

import os
if os.environ.has_key('WINGDB_ACTIVE'):
    p = os.path.dirname(command[1])
    sys.path.append(p)
    import run
    sys.argv = command[1:]
    run.run()
    return

This prevents Plone from running a sub-process, which breaks debugging because only the original parent process is debugged.

Note that this solution can take more time to launch than debugging with WingDBG since the entire startup process is debugged.

Performance Hints

Plone and Zope together contain a very large Python code base. If you Add Directory from the Project menu to include the entire Plone installation, you will see significant CPU intensive processing, which can be an issue on slower machines and may take several minutes to complete. Wing should remain responsive during this time but may be sluggish in some cases. The status of the project scan is shown at the top of the Project tool and status of analysis is in the lower left of the IDE window.

Processing should cease after a period of time and the rest of your Wing IDE session should run at near zero CPU usage.

Related Documents

Wing IDE provides many other options and tools. For more information: