Fabric is a library for simplifying system administration tasks. While Chef and Puppet tend to focus on managing servers and system libraries, fabric is more focused on application level tasks such as deployment.

Install Fabric:

$ pip install fabric

The following code will create two tasks that we can use: memory_usage and deploy. The former will output the memory usage on each machine. The latter will ssh into each server, cd to our project directory, activate the virtual environment, pull the newest codebase, and restart the application server.

from fabric.api import cd, env, prefix, run, task

env.hosts = ['my_server1', 'my_server2']

@task
def memory_usage():
    run('free -m')

@task
def deploy():
    with cd('/var/www/project-env/project'):
        with prefix('. ../bin/activate'):
            run('git pull')
            run('touch app.wsgi')

With the previous code saved in a file named fabfile.py, we can check memory usage with:

$ fab memory_usage
[my_server1] Executing task 'memory'
[my_server1] run: free -m
[my_server1] out:              total     used     free   shared  buffers   cached
[my_server1] out: Mem:          6964     1897     5067        0      166      222
[my_server1] out: -/+ buffers/cache:     1509     5455
[my_server1] out: Swap:            0        0        0

[my_server2] Executing task 'memory'
[my_server2] run: free -m
[my_server2] out:              total     used     free   shared  buffers   cached
[my_server2] out: Mem:          1666      902      764        0      180      572
[my_server2] out: -/+ buffers/cache:      148     1517
[my_server2] out: Swap:          895        1      894

and we can deploy with:

$ fab deploy

Additional features include parallel execution, interaction with remote programs, and host grouping.

.. todo:: Write about Chef

.. todo:: Write about Puppet

.. todo:: Write about Blueprint

.. todo:: Write about Buildout