Fabric Presentation at Python Pune April Meetup!

1. Introduction to Fabric
By
Suprith Gangawar
QE, RedHat
sgangawa@redhat.com

2. Deployment is Bothersome!

3. To be Covered
● What
● Why
● Pre-Requisites
● How – Demo
● Why not Others?

4. What is Fabric?
“Fabric is a command line tool for streamlining the
use of SSH for application deployment or system
administration tasks ”

5. What
● Automation tool
● Written in python
● Lets you execute arbitrary python functions
● Library of sub routines
● Application deployment tool

6. Why?
● Cmake
●
Jam
●
Makeit
● Make
● Scons
●
Ant
●
Salt
●
Chef
● Puppet
●
And..

7. Fabric's Good Points
● Less codes than shell scripts
● Less mistakes than handwork
● Less time to operate many servers

8. Pre Requisites
● Python 2.5+
● Python-setuptools (optional but preferred)
● Pip
● easy_install (in case you dont use 'pip')
● gcc

9. Fabric's Basics
● Install
– $ pip install fabric
● Setting
– $ make fabfile.py
● Run
– $ fab <Option><Fab file>

10. Fabric API's
● Core API
– Sudo
– Run
– Color output functions
– Network
– Context Managers
● Contrib API
– User I/O
– Modifying remote files
– Django Integration

11. Core Functionality
● local() - Run commands locally
● Run() - Run command remotely
● Sudo() - Run a command remotely as another
user
● Put() - Copy a file from local to remote
● Get() - Copy a file from remote to local

12. Demo..

13. Why not others?
1. Ansible is not supported on windows
2. Ansible is for larger deployments unlike fabric
3. Salt does not deal with interactivity
4. Salt eats your logs giving you a very small
feedback (states/module outputs)
5. Puppet: Solid knowledge of Ruby is highly
recommended
6. Chef: Not 'complete' as compared to puppet

14. References
1. http://docs.fabfile.org/en/1.10/
2. https://pypi.python.org/pypi/Fabric

15. Stay Tuned..
● Official Twitter Account: @pyfabric
● IRC (Freenode): #fabric
● Mailing list

16. Thank you