Plone In A Box™ (LTS)

Plone in a Box™ is an easy way to deploy a cloud server running Plone 5.2.

If you want to try a demo Plone site, a good starting point is to use https://demo.plone.org. Other Plone demo sites are available at https://plone.org/what-is-plone/plone/try-plone

However, if you want to take Plone for a longer test drive and see how it works with your own content and how you can collaborate on a Plone site with colleagues, you need to install it on a computer of your own.

Plone can be installed several different ways. You can run it natively on macOS, Linux, Unix, and Windows computers, and you can run it inside containers such as Vagrant and Docker.

You can install Plone on a computer of your own. Most commonly, however, Plone is run in a virtual machine hosted by cloud providers such as Amazon AWS, Linode, and DigitalOcean.

Your starting point for installing Plone is typically https://plone.org/download, where you would use the Plone unified installer, the simple Plone buildout, the Plone Docker, and some newer methods that use pip install.

But while these methods are great for developers, they’re less good for non-technical users who want to try Plone on a server of their own. This is what Plone in a Box™ tries to address.

Software Included

Creating an App using the Control Panel

Click this button to create a Droplet based on this 1-Click App. If you aren’t logged in, this link will prompt you to log in with your DigitalOcean account.

Creating an App using the API

In addition to creating a Droplet from the Plone In A Box™ (LTS) 1-Click App using the control panel, you can also use the DigitalOcean API. As an example, to create a 4GB Plone In A Box™ (LTS) Droplet in the SFO2 region, you can use the following curl command. You need to either save your API access token) to an environment variable or substitute it in the command below.

curl -X POST -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
         -H 'Authorization: Bearer '$TOKEN'' -d \
        '{"name":"choose_a_name","region":"sfo2","size":"s-2vcpu-4gb","image": "plone-ploneinabox"}' \
        "https://api.digitalocean.com/v2/droplets"

Getting Started After Deploying Plone In A Box™ (LTS)

Normally, you should wait a few minutes for your Droplet to be provisioned and for Plone to start.

Once Plone is ready, you can browse to http://your_droplet_public_ipv4:8080 to view your new Plone site.

It is not normally necessary, but if you need to access the underlying Zope Management Interface, browse to http://your_droplet_public_ipv4:8080/Plone

Also not normally necessary: you can log into the new Droplet server with
ssh [email protected]_droplet_public_ipv4, http://your_droplet_public_ipv4

For help with your new Plone In A Box™, please visit the Plone community forum at https://community.plone.org