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
    with fabtools.python.virtualenv('/home/myuser/env'):
        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
• Ubuntu 11.04
• Ubuntu 11.10

Tests

Running tests

If you're using Python 2.7, you can launch the tests using the built-in unittest runner:

$ python -m unittest discover

If you're using Python 2.5 or 2.6, you'll need to install unittest2, and use the provided runner:

$ pip install unittest2
$ unit2 discover

Or you can run the tests on all supported Python versions using tox, which will take care of everything:

$ pip install tox
$ tox

Unit tests

Running unit tests requires the mock library.

Functional tests

Running functional tests requires Vagrant to launch virtual machines, against which all the tests will be run.

If Vagrant is not installed, the functional tests will be skipped automatically.

If Vagrant is installed, the default is to run the tests on all available base boxes. You can specify which base boxes should be used by setting the VAGRANT_BOXES environment variable:

$ VAGRANT_BOXES='ubuntu_10_04 ubuntu_10_10' tox -e py27

You can also use this to manually disable functional tests:

$ VAGRANT_BOXES='' tox