cc.engine provides the Creative Commons license engine along with a set of related scripts. The scripts can be used for generating static versions of the license deeds.

NOTE: Unless you are installing this in Development Mode, you will need to run sudo ./bin/buildout (with root privileges), because the script needs to create directories in /etc and /var.

cc.engine uses zc.buildout to assemble the software and its dependencies. For example

$ python bootstrap/bootstrap.py
$ ./bin/buildout

After the buildout process completes the application may be started using the generated init script

# /etc/init.d/cc_engine-run-cc_engine start

You can prevent the service from detaching from the console as a daemon with the fg argument (instead of ``start'')

# /etc/init.d/cc_engine-run-cc_engine fg

If you get a UnicodeDecodeError from the cc.engine (you'll see this if it's running in the foreground) when you try to access the http:https://host:9080/license/ then it's likely that the install of python you are using is set to use ASCII as it's default output. You can change this to UTF-8 by creating the file /usr/lib/python<version>/sitecustomize.py and adding these lines:

import sys sys.setdefaultencoding("utf-8")

If you are working on developing cc.engine, a special buildout configuration is provided. This configuration differs from the default in the following ways:

• Zope is configured to run in devmode.
• A XXX report is generated at time of buildout.

You can build cc.engine for development by specifying the buildout configuration on the command line

$ ./bin/buildout -c dev.buildout.cfg

cc.engine relies of lxml, which is a Python wrapper for libxml2 and libxslt1. If you system has older versions of these libraries installed, cc.engine may fail with Unknown symbol errors. A specialized buildout configuration is provided to download and build a local version of libxml2, libxslt1 and lxml if needed. To use this, specify the configuration on the command line

$ ./bin/buildout -c lxml.buildout.cfg

Note that this builds in production mode.

In order to improve performance, cc.engine provides scripts which may be used to generate static versions of the license. The script, mkdeeds, is built as part of the buildout process. Run

$ ./bin/mkdeeds -h

for a complete list of options and parameters.

• docs/source/tech_overview.rst
• docs/source/orverarching_infrastructure.rst
• docs/source/history.rst