Don't use Fabric. Seriously, just don't.
It's easier to set up than puppet/chef, but you lose a huge amount of flexibility/robustness. All fabric does is runs commands on host machines. Dependency management is your responsibility.
It's easier to set up than puppet/chef, but you lose a huge amount of flexibility/robustness. All fabric does is runs commands on host machines. Dependency management is your responsibility.
Anyway, you can go a long way with just a bunch of scripts leveraging Fabric's API. I have setup ~10 servers for a news portal I run from the ground up in just a few lines of code. Managing dependencies is not ridiculously difficult as you make it sound, package managers (apt-get, pip) already handle that for you without any overhead.
The issue I ran into with fabric is that I often got stuck in dependency hell. The following is fabric's simplest method of dependency management:
def install_foo():
install_foo_dependency()
...
So you typically have functions like:
def full_deploy():
install_foo_dependency()
install_foo_without_dependency()
Why not use pip(pip install -r reqs.txt)?
def install_deps():
local('pip install -r reqs.txt')
with in_tmp_dir():
run('wget http://someserver/project_bleeding_edge.tar.gz')
run('tar -xvzf project_bleeding_edge.tar.gz')
run('./configure; make;')
sudo('make install')
put('conf/server.conf', 'server.conf')
sudo('mv server.conf /etc/server.conf')
edit: Doh, I can't read