The zotonic command

The zotonic command runs a number of utility commands which all operate on a Zotonic instance.

The zotonic command lives in the bin/ folder of the Zotonic source. Putting this path into your PATH variable makes working with Zotonic a lot easier:

export PATH=$HOME/zotonic/bin:$PATH

The command determines where the Zotonic base dir is by looking at its path; it always assumes that its zotonic basedir is one dir up from where the binary itself is.

Currently, the following subcommands are implemented:

zotonic start

Start the background Zotonic server instance.

zotonic stop

Stop the background Zotonic server instance.

zotonic debug

Launch the Zotonic server interactively and get an EShell on the running instance. See The Zotonic shell. The start.sh command in the root folder is a shortcut for this command.

zotonic restart

Restart the background Zotonic server instance.

zotonic update

Update the server. Compiles and loads any new code, flushes caches and rescans all modules.

zotonic shell

Get an EShell on the running instance. See The Zotonic shell.

zotonic addsite [options] <site_name>

Creates a new site with [site_name] as its name. See The zotonic addsite command for a full overview of this command.

zotonic modules <subcommand> [options]

Manages modules. It has the following subcommands:

install <module> [module2, ...] Installs a module from the http://modules.zotonic.com repository into your Zotonic instance. The module will be checked out using source control (either git or hg) into the priv/modules folder.

uninstall <module> [module2, ...] Uninstall a module

activate <module> [module2, ...] Activate a module

deactivate <module> [module2, ...] Deactivate a module

update <module> [module2, ...] Update a module

restart <module> [module2, ...] Restart a module

reinstall <module> [module2, ...] Reinstall a module

sync-branches Tries to update all installed modules to reflect the module’s branch to the currently checked out Zotonic branch.

list List all modules available on the Zotonic Module Repository

search <query> Search for a module

subcommand options:

--version	show program’s version number and exit
-h, --help	show this help message and exit
-z ZMR, --zmr=ZMR
	Zotonic modules repository
-s SITE, --site=SITE
	affected Zotonic site
-d, --debug	enable debugging
-n NODE, --node=NODE
	Zotonic Erlang node

zotonic copysite [site_name] [source_server]

Copy [site_name] and its database content from the [source_server] over SSH and load its content into the filesystem and database of the local machine. You will need to have created the database zotonic_[site_name] for this to work.

Warning: This command will reset the content of the database to the content retrieved from the [source_server]. It does, however, generate and output a restore file in case this was run by accident and explains how to recover.

zotonic createdb [site_name]

Create a database called zotonic_[site_name] with the basic setup in place to host a Zotonic datastore. This script will likely need to be run as postgres unless zotonic has been granted CREATEDB in postgres as follows:

ALTER ROLE zotonic WITH CREATEDB

zotonic sitedir [site_name]

Get the absolute path for a site based on [site_name]

zotonic snapshot [site_name]

Take a version control snapshot of [site_name] including its database content.

This works differently from mod_backup in that it consistently uses the same filename for the SQL backup to make revision-based full site rollbacks possible.

zotonic update

Update the server. Compiles and loads any new code, flushes caches and rescans all modules.

zotonic compile

Compiles all the Zotonic Erlang source files, modules and sites, including those in the user sites directory and user modules directory (see Global configuration). This command is mainly called from the Makefile when building Zotonic. It does not compile Zotonic’s dependencies (the Erlang files under the deps/ folder). This command can only be run when Zotonic is not running; for hot code reloads, use zotonic update.

zotonic compilefile [files...]

Compiles and reloads a single Erlang module within the Zotonic folder. This runs very fast and works very well on a save-hook of your text editor. In Emacs, it would be called like this:

(add-hook 'erlang-mode-hook
      '(lambda ()
         (add-hook 'after-save-hook '
                   (lambda ()
                     (call-process "/path/to/your/bin/zotonic" nil "*scratch*" nil "compilefile" buffer-file-name)
                     )
                   )
         ))

zotonic logtail

Starts a tail -F on the three Zotonic log files, console.log, error.log and crash.log