Re: [Fab-user] Experiences working with Fabric

[Jeff Forcier]

Hi Dan,

Apologies for the delayed response, I had a pretty busy end-of-year
holiday period :)

Note: I know a lot of your suggestions are more on the informative
side and are not requests/complaints per se, but I still wanted to
address them just for the record.

> Puppet

Neat stuff! I'm about to embark on an evaluation of Puppet and Chef
and their related tools, and I know folks have integrated Fabric with
Chef already -- good to see somebody doing it with Puppet too.

> - The fabric sudo() operation had to have pty=True often enough that it
> might merit a global switch. In the end I reconfigured the sudoers files on
> all of the machines, but I could only do this because I had sufficient
> access to the machines.

This was added in the work leading up to 1.0:

    http://docs.fabfile.org/1.0a/usage/env.html#always-use-pty

Because yea -- it kind of needed it :)

> - Something I wanted time and time again was a remote analogue to the GNU
> install command, ideally something a little like this (which I suspect is
> Debian-specific):

The put() function is also getting a serious facelift for 1.0,
including better control over file permissions. (So basically, your
install() function would IIRC be replaceable with some additional
kwargs to put().)

> Lots of goodies re: role/host setup and metadata

I don't think we address too many of these in Fabric 1.0, but they're
all known issues that have some branch work or at least brainstorming,
and will almost definitely be made better in 1.1. I'll keep your notes
in mind as those tickets come across my plate -- thanks!

> I hope the above is useful. I've found Fabric to be an excellent tool; the
> developers were writing deployment scripts in ant. I'm pleased to report
> that having converted them to Fabric they are easier to read and maintain,
> more flexible, and faster.

Awesome -- glad to hear it! Thanks again for your email -- it's always
great to hear mostly-positive feedback, helps keep us going ;)

Best,
Jeff

-- 
Jeff Forcier
Unix sysadmin; Python/Ruby engineer
http://bitprophet.org