fabfile.py

Fabric is basically a makefile, except has server management built in. Being able to run fab prod deploy to send your latest modification to the server is sweet. It also is a great way to document common tasks that you do when managing servers, without writing the whole process up in Sphinx or elsewhere.

• Hosts

Hosts

Fabric seems to work best when you can login into a host with ssh keys, and have sudo rights. So that the fabfile.py can be in source control, but host information can be left out, the fabfile can get hosts from fabhosts.py.

To create fabhost.py either copy and modify fabhost-example.py or write along these lines:

from fabric.api import env

def prod():
    env.user = 'user'
    env.hosts = [
        'host.com',
    ]

Then to run fabric with those hosts, just fab prod <command>.

If you are awesome enough to have staging servers or other groups of server that you will be commanding, define another command in fabhosts.py and modify fabfile.py import statement

try:
    from fabhost import prod, staging
except ImportError:
    pass