ZODB Browser

The ZODB browser allows you to inspect persistent objects stored in the ZODB, view their attributes and historical changes made to them.

Usage as a standalone project

Install all the dependencies into the source tree with zc.buildout:

python bootstrap.py
bin/buildout

Run bin/zodbbrowser specifying either a filename or a ZEO address

bin/zodbbrowser /path/to/Data.fs
bin/zodbbrowser --zeo localhost:9080
bin/zodbbrowser --zeo /path/to/zeosock

If you don't have a spare Data.fs to test with, you can create a new empty one with just the barest Zope 3 scaffolding in it:

bin/zodbbrowser empty.fs --rw

Open http://localhost:8070 in a web browser. Note that there are no access controls; all other users on the local machine will be able to access the database contents.

Or you could try to use easy_install or pip. It may work or it may not, depending on the current state of all the dependencies (buildout.cfg hardcodes dependency version to a known-working-together state, called the "Zope 3.4 Known Good Set", so buildout-based installs are safer)

easy_install zodbbrowser
zodbbrowser /path/to/Data.fs

Command-line options

Run bin/zodbbrowser --help to see a full and up-to-date list of command-line options:

Usage: zodbbrowser [options] [FILENAME | --zeo ADDRESS]

Open a ZODB database and start a web-based browser app.

Options:
  -h, --help        show this help message and exit
  --zeo=ADDRESS     connect to ZEO server instead
  --listen=ADDRESS  specify port (or host:port) to listen on
  --rw              open the database read-write (allows creation of the
                    standard Zope local utilities if missing)

Help! Broken objects everywhere

If you don't want to see <persistent broken ...> everywhere, make sure your application objects are importable from the Python path. The easiest way of doing that is adding zodbbrowser to your application's buildout (or virtualenv, if you use virtualenvs). This way your application (or Zope's) nice __repr__ will also be used.

Online help

There's a little 'help' link in the bottom-right corner of every page that describes the user interface in greater detail.

Usage as a plugin

Add zodbbrowser to the list of eggs (e.g. in buildout.cfg of your app) and add this to your site.zcml:

<include package="zodbbrowser" />

Rerun bin/buildout, restart Zope and append @@zodbbrowser to the end of the URL to start browsing, e.g. http://localhost:8080/@@zodbbrowser. Or, if you still use ZMI (the Zope Management Interface), look for a new menu item titled "ZODB Browser".

Alternatives

There's a package called z3c.zodbbrowser in the Zope svn repository that implements the same idea (but without history browsing) as a GUI desktop application written using wxPython. It doesn't have a website and was never released to the Python Package Index.

There's also dm.historical which provides access to object history from an interactive Python shell.

If you're not interested in history or objects that cannot be reached through URL traversal, you can use the built-in object inspector that comes with Zope 3 / Grok.

Authors

ZODB Browser was developed by Tautvilas Mečinskas (tautvilas@pov.lt) and Marius Gedminas (marius@pov.lt) from Programmers of Vilnius. It is licenced under the Zope Public Licence.

Please report bugs at https://github.com/mgedmin/zodbbrowser/issues.

There's an old bugtracker at https://bugs.launchpad.net/zodbbrowser but I'd really rather prefer new bugs in GitHub.