Re: [Fab-user] Deploying different things to different computers

[Jeff Forcier]

On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 4:10 PM, Heikki Toivonen <address@hidden> wrote:
> I started looking at Fabric to help me deploy an application that runs
> on a group of different computers, with different operating systems all
> needing different software installed. There are several environments
> where this application needs to be installed, and there are of course
> updates that need to be rolled out into all those environments, so an
> automated solution would be needed.
>
> [...]
>
> A related problem I have is that when I need to deploy this application
> in a different environment, the account names, login names, machine
> names, directory structures etc. may change and I would not like to
> create different fabfiles for different environments since the logic
> does not change.
>
> [...]

Hi Heikki,

I don't have an immediate answer, except to say that I've seen this
potential issue sort of loom on the horizon as I've been hacking on
Fabric and starting to use it myself. I'm blessed with a *largely*
homogenous Debian/Ubuntu environment, but there's enough of a
CentOS/RHEL/OS X minority that I'll need to scratch this sort of itch
myself eventually if it's not scratched by Christian or another
hacker. So I'm pretty sure that someone in the nearish future will
update Fabric so it's a bit easier to tweak the config at runtime /
have a config-loading system like what you propose.

Also, one tool you may or may not be aware of which tries to deal with
this sort of problem in a BIG way is Puppet,
http://reductivelabs.com/projects/puppet/ . I haven't migrated to it
myself because I feel it's overkill for the sorts of smaller / less
over-arching tasks I use Fabric for; but it sounds like a pretty good
systematic approach to "doing the same thing on different types of
systems" which is basically what the problem is.

Regards,
Jeff