5 minute Plone 4 install on Cloud9 IDE

Update (Feb 19, 2016): Plone 5 is the latest version and I've done a blog post on how to get Plone 5  running on Cloud 9 IDE.

This is an overview of getting Plone 4 (4.3.6 at the time of writing) up and running in 5 minutes or less on Cloud9 IDE. The aim of this is to make it easy, especially for students, to try out Plone, and more importantly Plone development for zero dollars. My previously recommended cloud based options (Nitrous and Codio) no longer offer a viable free tier.

Step 0 - Get a Cloud9 IDE account

You will need to get an account with Cloud9 IDE, so go and sign up over there and then come back here.

Step 1 - Start a new Custom Box

Not much to say here.  You can accept all the defaults to and then click "Create Workspace".

Step 2 - Run the Plone installer script

In the terminal paste the following command and press enter to begin the installation:

curl -L https://goo.gl/Enjwms | bash

You will see output similar to this:

Step 3 - Launch the server

Run the following commands to start Plone as a foreground process.

cd $HOME/workspace/zinstance
bin/instance fg

To stop plone use Ctrl + C.

Step 4 - Setup Plone

You will know that Plone is running when you see the following message in the terminal.

 "Zope Ready to handle requests" ([3] in the screenshot below). 

You can view the default administrator credentials, username and password under 'workspace' >  'zinstance' in a file called adminPassword.txt ([2] in the screenshot below). To go to your live server select 'Preview' > 'Preview Running Application'  ([1] in the screenshot below). 

You will see the Zope server ready to create your first Plone site.  Start by clicking the little icon to pop it out into a new window.

You can now create a new Plone site, you will be prompted for your Admin credentials (we discussed the adminpassword.txt above)

Zope server, ready to create a Plone Site

Click create Plone site and enter your credentials.

Important things of note

Cloud9 IDE provides a proxy that listens on port 8080, this is the default port for Plone if you change the port later on you will not be able to access the site using the Preview link.

This is for the purpose of development NOT PRODUCTION USE. For developing your new Plone based site you can work right here.