Introduction

fabtools includes useful functions to help you write your Fabric files.

fabtools makes it easier to manage system users, packages, databases, etc.

fabtools includes a number of low-level actions, as well as a higher level interface called require.

Using require allows you to use a more declarative style, similar to Chef or Puppet.

Example

Here is an example fabfile using fabtools.

from fabric.api import *
from fabtools import require
import fabtools

@task
def setup():

    # Require some Debian/Ubuntu packages
    require.deb.packages([
        'imagemagick',
        'libxml2-dev',
    ])

    # Require a Python package
    require.python.package('pyramid')

    # Require an email server
    require.postfix.server('example.com')

    # Require a PostgreSQL server
    require.postgres.server()
    require.postgres.user('myuser', 's3cr3tp4ssw0rd')
    require.postgres.database('myappsdb', 'myuser')

    # Require a supervisor process for our app
    require.supervisor.process('myapp',
        command='/home/myuser/env/bin/gunicorn_paster /home/myuser/env/myapp/production.ini',
        directory='/home/myuser/env/myapp',
        user='myuser'
        )

    # Require an nginx server proxying to our app
    require.nginx.proxied_site('example.com',
        docroot='/home/myuser/env/myapp/myapp/public',
        proxy_url='http://127.0.0.1:8888'
        )

    # Setup a daily cron task
    fabtools.cron.add_daily('maintenance', 'myuser', 'my_script.py')

Supported targets

fabtools currently supports the following target operating systems:

• Ubuntu 10.04 LTS
• Ubuntu 10.10

Tests

The tests use Vagrant to launch virtual machines, against which all the tests will be run.

You can launch the tests using the Python 2.7 built-in unittest runner:

$ python -m unittest tests

Note that you must have vagrant base boxes named ubuntu_10_04 and ubuntu_10_10 for the tests to work out of the box. You may edit the BASE_BOXES list in tests/__init__.py to match your local configuration if necessary.