Buildout and hosts timing out: configuring shorter timeout and known-good host set

Question

If I have understood correctly buildout internally uses setuptools and setuptools ramdomly scrapes HTML pages in hope to finding eggs. This lead to the following problem if any critical host is down and it is referred from PyPi README etc.:

Download error on http://svn.plone.org/svn/collective/ZopeSkel/trunk: timed out -- Some packages may not be found!
Download error on http://svn.plone.org/svn/collective/ZopeSkel/trunk: timed out -- Some packages may not be found!
Download error on http://svn.plone.org/svn/collective/ZopeSkel/trunk: timed out -- Some packages may not be found!
Download error on http://svn.plone.org/svn/collective/ZopeSkel/trunk: timed out -- Some packages may not be found!
Download error on http://svn.plone.org/svn/collective/ZopeSkel/trunk: timed out -- Some packages may not be found!

Because each URL fetch will 1) block buildout progress 2) timeout in long time running buildout becomes pain (takes hours)

How to configure buildout

• Timeout faster

• Not to scrape arbitrary URLs and what is good known URL set for Plone and common add-ons

Answer 1

To set a timeout of five seconds use bin/buildout -t 5

Answer 2

Set the allow-hosts parameter in the buildout section e.g.:

[buildout]
allow-hosts =
  *.python.org

This forces buildout to only look on PyPI for downloads.