Fabric hits 1.0

I've been using a simple Fabric script from http://ericholscher.com/blog/2010/nov/8/building-django-app-... to automate Chef deploys. Blueprint tried to install a lot of nonsense on my box, and I decided that learning Chef proper would be a much better investment of my time.

howradical2• 15 years ago

DevStructure co-founder here, sorry to hear about your experience. Not sure when you installed blueprint, but we've recently open-sourced it and it's been ported to python. Should require minimal "stuff" to use it. Let us know if you have any questions or problems and again my apologies.

https://github.com/devstructure/blueprint

thibaut_barrere• 15 years ago

If you are interested to learn chef-solo/vagrant, please see http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=2292140 (which I just posted). I'm planning to write an e-book on the topic.

sophacles2• 15 years ago

There are plenty of cases where deployment script language matters. Usually they revolve around having lots of tools/objects/etc already written in a language, and want to incorporate them into your automation system. This is how I found fabric to begin with.

niels• 15 years ago

I use Fabric both at work and for my own projects. It's really simple to use, and I especially like that each function automatically becomes a Fabric command. Makes it easy to do "fab test", "fab migrate"... etc.

tomazmuraus• 15 years ago

Nice to see a new release, but there is still no official support for a parallel execution :(

There are some forks with a parallel support, but all of the ones which I have tried are pretty buggy / incomplete.

I have signed up for a Fabric PyCon sprint, hopefully I can help with adding / finishing the parallel support.

ajdecon• 15 years ago

I currently like pdsh (http://code.google.com/p/pdsh/) for doing remote sysadmin: it parallelizes very nicely, and I love being able to issue commands like "pdsh -w compute[000-100] yum update package" to manage hundreds of nodes at a time.

That said, I can see use cases for Fabric where you're implementing some complex logic in Python which you'd like to push out to your servers, rather than just doing simple shell commands or pre-pushing your scripts. But I can't tell how well Fabric parallelizes... being Python I'd expect it to be single-threaded :( , but I might be wrong.

Edit:typo

acdha• 15 years ago

It's also useful once you get out of trivial shell-scripts and need things like sane error handling or data structures, shell chains or escaping, etc. I wrote something like pdsh in the early 2000s in Perl and almost always used it to launch scripts written in a real programming language for any non-trivial task - e.g. even that yum command gets tricky if there's any possible interactive prompting going on or you want to parse output.

Here's Fabric's parallelism ticket: http://code.fabfile.org/issues/show/19

asksol• 15 years ago

oh, so bash is suddenly multi-threaded now? :)

python does multiprocessing just fine: http://docs.python.org/library/multiprocessing.html

riffraff• 15 years ago

bash may not, but pdsh is (I personally used dsh, which also multiplexes ssh connections) and the child processes do not bear the lack of multithreadness of the parents :)

old-gregg• 15 years ago

Am I missing something? I thought we're were going to get parallel execution, @task decorator and nicer control over 'env' in 1.0? There was a post about it just a few days ago. Right now I don't see anything from that in 1.0

gecko• 15 years ago

That was a fork. While they'll hopefully get merged in, they're not currently in the official queue.

sophacles2• 15 years ago

There are implementations of those features that are and have been in the official queue for a while.

mace• 15 years ago

You're referring to a fork of fabric that was posted to HN a few weeks ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2250001

The author of that fork wants to contribute those changes back to the fabric project. But that did not happen before the 1.0 release.

Fabric hits 1.0

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