Having used zc.buildout on all of our projects at work, I have been convinced that this is one of the better development environment and deployment processes I have seen. The fact that you can work on the same environment locally as you do on production is nice and effecient for me. There is somewhat of a setup lag that occurs when configuring the buildout project for development vs. staging vs. production, but in the end all of the hassle is worth it. Once you have done it a few times you get used to the way buildout does things, and you see how powerful it can actually be.
There are a few people that I have found that use buildout as their environment on webfaction.com servers, but they all seem overly complex from what I can tell. I wanted to use buildout with webfaction, but from what I could see, it envolved a lot of hacking to make it work correctly on webfaction. After talking to my boss (@benlliles) about what he does on his webfaction account, it occurred that like others I was overcomplicating things where it is actually a pretty simple process.
Here is my buildout project setup before I run the buildout script:
django_project/
apache2/
bin/
conf/
modules/
bin/
daily_cleanup.py
django-admin.py
django.wsgi
profiling/
unique-messages.py
project/
bootstrap.py
buildout.cfg
development.cfg
production.cfg
staging.cfg
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