[Fab-user] Fabric execution with Python calls instead of command-line

[Carles Barrobés i Meix]

Hi all,

I'm writing a Django site to allow me remotely manage a series of 
customer installs of a web application using fabric.

My goal is to call fabric from within some of my Django views (i.e. run 
some task in a fabfile on some remote servers, all from within the 
webapp), but I wouldn't like to run "fab" necessarily as a subprocess. 
I'd like to call the equivalent python methods of fabric instead of a 
command line.

I was taking a look at the sources of the fabric.main module but it 
seems to rely very much on command line argument parsing but it doesn't 
seem to provide the necessary high-level functions to separate parsing 
and execution (main() is 150 lines and does a lot of stuff).

So far I started using load_fabfile to load a fabfile and get a list of 
tasks, so that I can present them in my view for selection. But since 
the fabric.main module is an undocumented part of fabric, I'm not sure I 
can rely on it staying stable across releases.

My questions, mainly to the developers:
- Can I rely on using functions in fabric.main?
- Are there plans to refactor fabric.main so that it is more usable in 
the way I suggest, and eventually become a published API?
- Would you be open to contributions in that direction?

Thanks in advance.
C.