I’ve been exploring zc.buildout (another link) lately. In the past, I’ve typically gone the simpler route of using virtualenv and pip, but I knew that buildout could do some powerful things and I’ve long wanted to kick the tires.

I’m using buildout for a Django project at work and it’s working out pretty well, though I sense that I might just be scratching the surface. Tonight, I wanted to play with some of the other buildout recipes.

The result is this educational buildout gist that demonstrates a recipe for building and deploying Varnish and a recipe for installing Supervisor.

The supervisor manages two processes — a simple one-line Python “origin server” on port 8080 and a Varnish reverse proxy on port 8000.