Fabric is a Python library designed to execute shell commands remotely over SSH | Hacker News Reader

Fabric is a Python library designed to execute shell commands remotely over SSH

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Glad Fabric is still around. But Ansible is simpler and the way to really go now.

You focus mainly on the tasks that you need with Ansible instead of the scripts.

Also you have a whole community of Ansible plugins that you can reuse for your own.

Fabric was good at one point, but it missed the migration period to Python 3, hence pushing everyone away.

I'm not even sure Fabric is on the safest Python 3.8 yet.

Fabric was fun though.

Fabric uses Paramiko, which is GNU, which means the lawyers at my company said that I couldn't use it, since I would be distributing it to some extent (for use at vendor site).

Is it a dirty industry secret that most people/companies who use these open source libraries are violating their licenses, especially around the distribution? I always see great libraries posted on HN, but I don't see how anyone can actually use them, in a professional setting.

> which is GNU, which means the lawyers at my company said that I couldn't use it

Then either your company is doing something evil or those lawyers are idiots. Nothing in the GPL treats commercial use any differently than non-commercial use, and you're allowed to distribute GPL'd software as long as you make the GPL'd source available to whoever you make the binaries available to.

> GPL'd source available to whoever you make the binaries available to.

Or, perhaps compliance for this is their exact concern.

Unless you're just distributing .pyc files, I think for Python you are distributing the source for "free"

The recipient of an on prem installation of proprietary Python software may have visibility of the source but they don’t have permission to distribute it to others, as GPL would require.

Right but Paramiko is LGPL, and presumably they could redistribute that.

For GPL software, yes.

If anyone inquires you point them to the appropriate github page or whatnot. As long as you're not adding your own patches it's really not relevant.

If I understand right, it's fine for commercial use as long as you don't modify it. If you do, you have to publish the modified version under GPL. Your lawyers are probably right to be so paranoid though, it's very hard to track and if found it can cost millions...

No, the code that uses the library is a derivative work of the library, whether or not it modifies the library.

GPL still allows commercial use in any case, it just requires you release your code under GPL.

Paramiko is licensed under the LGPL, though, so that doesn't apply here.

Don’t see Paramiko in the list of GNU packages.

https://www.gnu.org/software/software.en.html#allgnupkgs

Sorry, it's GNU LGPL.

https://github.com/paramiko/paramiko/blob/main/LICENSE

IANAL, and I didn't ask for an explanation, but I suspect the problem was that I was making a library, which, from my uneducated reading, would qualify as a derived work.

I know our company is especially strict since, from my understanding, significant enough money has already been spent on legal fees.

I liked fabric a lot But trying to use fabric for everything feels like reinventing the wheel. Ansible already does those stuff

For the rare occasions I need something like this, I’m glad Fabric exists. I find Ansible to be almost unusably obtuse, it does not gel with how I think about networked systems at all.

I'm glad Fabric is still around. I used it at my previous company. I might even prefer it over the Ansible we use at my current company.

Fabric can be a replacement for adhoc shell scripts for chore/CI tasks in a project e.g., it can be `make docs` replacement. It is the best of both worlds: shell one-liners glued together using Python.

It doesn't replace ansible--it invokes it (it plays the role of the vagrant utility in this case).

Before Ansible, there was Fabric! :sunglasses:

Anyone who uses this, is it used for remote system management, or as a way to “remote” expensive operations?

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