Deploying Django sites with Fabric, Pip and virtualenv: Ryan Williams
ryanwilliams.org
ryanwilliams.org
There's been a pretty significant overhaul of Fabric since then, and it's really improved quite a bit. You can check out the major changes in current release here: http://docs.fabfile.org/0.9.0/changes/0.9.html
I am the author. Check it out and tell me what you think!
Of course this article pretty much hits the overlap right on the head...
I may need to write up something on the subject, but you can use envbuilder[1] to simplify working with the pip and virtualenv part. This works especially well if you have several chunks of code you need to check out from VCS.
Although I still don't like the way you have to write commands in fabric. I mean, the multiple commands in the single run call. Its not quite readable and thus too error prone.
We do the timestamped versions too, but our build process tars everything we need up and SCPs it over. Our release directories usually need to be transformed, though, and can't work as a simple git checkout.