I’ve been a big fan of the fabric project for a long time now. It has made my life very easy in the past and gets better with each new release. Well a few weeks ago I got introduced to a fork of the project by Tav. It provides many new feature additions to fabric and makes fabric a little bit better. So the best way to get it started is via the following

git clone git://github.com/tav/pylibs.git
cd pylibs
python setup.py
export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:`pwd`

Once installed, you have to create a fab app

vi /usr/bin/fab

Then you want to add the following contents to it

#!/usr/bin/env python

from fabric.main import main
main()

Then you want to give it the correct permissions

chmod +x /usr/bin/fab

Now create a directory and place a fabfile.py file in it.

Now create a config.yml file and use the following as a simple template

default:
  shell: /bin/bash -l -c

servers:
  directory: /dir
  hosts:
    - host1.domain.com
    - host2.domain.com

Then your fab file could look something like

from fabric.api import *

env.config_file = 'config.yml'
env.user = 'mzupan'

@task('servers')
def command():
    env().multirun('uname -a')

Normally fabric runs in serial, but Tav’s port adds a multirun() function that runs the commands in parallel. BONUS!

Feel free to play around with it and check out his blog post on it to get more commands.

http://tav.espians.com/fabric-python-with-cleaner-api-and-parallel-deployment-support.html