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Comment by heretohelp | Hacker News Reader

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/Fabric/0.9.0

Edit:

The primary weakness of my approach is that for convenience's sake, I rely heavily on apt-get. So hypothetically I'm tied to the debian family. (we use Ubuntu LTS of a couple different versions)

Strictly speaking this disadvantage is unnecessary, you could do all from-source builds using fabric if you wanted. Didn't seem like a constructive use of my time though.

Sample task in my fabfile:

https://gist.github.com/3086836

I'll let you guess from the function name what it does.

The magic word of devops is "idempotence".

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There's a new project called Ansible that may be of interest to you:

http://ansible.github.com/

While that page has a long list of things they do, the important bits relevant to your comment are

1. a tighter focus on idempotence than Fabric 2. an easy-ish way to integrate package management so you could potentially use the same script to kick off either yum or apt depending on the box

The original reason I abandoned chef and puppet is that I didn't like something getting between me and the shell.

Why would I make the same mistake twice? My only real dissatisfaction with Flask is that it cannot handle dispatching its work in parallel. Not a big deal though.

I like knowing exactly how things get done.

Doesn't Fabric support parallel instructions now? I think I heard something about that, although I'm not entirely sure...

Yes, yes - it does. If you'd like to read more about it, visit: http://fabric.readthedocs.org/en/1.3.0/usage/parallel.html

I was thinking more along the lines of parallel connections.

Yeah, it turns out that's what it does, rather than parallel instructions/commands: http://fabric.readthedocs.org/en/1.3.0/usage/parallel.html

Oh God, why do they put hosts in /etc/ansible? Why would I corrupt my system installation with project-specific files? What I want to do is make a "<project>-deployment" folder and have everything related to deployment there.

Why the hell would I store anything about deploying one of my projects in /etc/?

I had a modest epiphany some weeks back thinking about server configuration management: if you want to manage configurations on a given node (to use Chef lingo), it's best to work within a system that facilitates and/or encourages this.

For a number of reasons, Debian (or faithful derivatives) comes closest to this of any platform I've encountered.

That said: fabric appears to be little more than a multi-system aware task runner. Somewhat like dsh (distributed ssh / dancer's shell): http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/software/dsh.html

... or like Capistrano, as the Debian package description suggests (modulo installing Rails).

There's a bad pimp joke around "idempotence" waiting to be made.

Your task here would seem to install Oracle's Java 7 HostSpot JVM.

How do you get around the licensing question(s) (or is that what the "-y" is for)?

That's what the -y is for.

> fabric appears to be little more than a multi-system aware task runner.

And C is little more than a portable assembler ;)

Fair enough. I'm not trying to be trite, just reading what I see.

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