What about a warning in the docs to check if mr.bob is already installed or available in PATH to avoid problems?

Start with the installation documentation and the subprocess call in plonecli/cli.py around line 72, then compare it with the version check around line 43. Document that mr.bob must be installed and available in PATH, and explain that conflicting installations can produce unintended results or a missing-command error.

• Plone CLI version:
  plonecli : 1.1
  bobtemplates.plone: 4.0.4
• Python version: 2.7.16
• Operating System: Ubuntu 18.04

Description

Don't know if this is exactly a "bug", since I don't know if this problem can happen in another setups. I'm trying to know if it's possible to have some kind of documentation to avoid the problem I had (and forget me if it's out of the scope of the project, at least will be indexed by search engines and more people with similar problems will benefit).

In the past, to avoid dependency conflicts with python packages in my system python, I used to install a new python in my machine and all development utilities (like flake8, mr.bob and such) were pip installed there. Then, I added this python bin folder to PATH, so the utilities would be available.

It's a bit overkill but it worked and avoided dependency conflicts.

Nowadays, I try to use pipsi to acomplish this feature of installing python utilities, and installed plonecli this way. So far, so good.

I started creating my templates but having lots of problems: what was supposed to be created based on what was in the source code in github wasn't being created in my machine. I ran plonecli --versions and it was with correct versions:

plonecli : 1.1
bobtemplates.plone: 4.0.4

I've decided to dig a little in the source code and realized that, since plonecli uses mr.bob as a subprocess call, it was using that mr.bob installation, which had a bobtemplates.plone 3.5.x installed. plonecli --versions was checking the installed bobtemplates.plone in plonecli pipsi virtualenv instead of the bobtemplates.plone used in the mr.bob used in the subprocess call.

So, I removed the old installation of mr.bob. Then, I got the traceback:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/user/.local/bin/plonecli", line 11, in <module>
    sys.exit(cli())
  File "/home/user/.local/venvs/plonecli/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/click/core.py", line 764, in __call__
    return self.main(*args, **kwargs)
  File "/home/user/.local/venvs/plonecli/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/click/core.py", line 717, in main
    rv = self.invoke(ctx)
  File "/home/user/.local/venvs/plonecli/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/click/core.py", line 1163, in invoke
    rv.append(sub_ctx.command.invoke(sub_ctx))
  File "/home/user/.local/venvs/plonecli/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/click/core.py", line 956, in invoke
    return ctx.invoke(self.callback, **ctx.params)
  File "/home/user/.local/venvs/plonecli/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/click/core.py", line 555, in invoke
    return callback(*args, **kwargs)
  File "/home/user/.local/venvs/plonecli/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/click/decorators.py", line 17, in new_func
    return f(get_current_context(), *args, **kwargs)
  File "/home/user/.local/venvs/plonecli/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/plonecli/cli.py", line 72, in create
    subprocess.call(['mrbob', bobtemplate, '-O', name])
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/subprocess.py", line 172, in call
    return Popen(*popenargs, **kwargs).wait()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/subprocess.py", line 394, in __init__
    errread, errwrite)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/subprocess.py", line 1047, in _execute_child
    raise child_exception
OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory

But it is the intended behavior, since I'm using pipsi instead of installing like it's said in the docs and I need to do export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/.local/venvs/plonecli/bin before calling plonecli. This doesn't happen when doing the pip installation in the docs because mr.bob would be in the PATH.

But nevertheless I was thinking if a warning "check for mr.bob installation in your installation, since plonecli does a shell mr.bob call using subprocess and if you have it somewhere in your PATH you may have unintended results" would be overkill.

To use an older versions of plonecli and mrbob, I used pipenv (pipenv install --skip-lock -r requirements.txt) and a requirements.txt with plonecli==0.2.0 (https://github.com/plone/plonecli/blob/0.2.0/setup.py#L28) and bobtemplates.plone==3.4.2 (https://github.com/plone/bobtemplates.plone/blob/master/CHANGES.rst#342-2018-08-13).