IT Operations with Fabric

There is frequently a split between the application development environment and the live deployment environment. When the application ends up running on a remote host while you are doing your work on a workstation, it can be helpful to simplify remote system operations. Flask-Diamond uses Fabric to make it pretty easy to invoke system functions from the command line.

Using Fabric

To use the Flask-Diamond Fabric functionality, navigate to the root directory of the project and issue the following command:

fab help

This will list all of the available commands.

Flask-Diamond Fabric Commands

By default, Flask-Diamond provides a fabfile.py with the scaffold with the following functionality:

• rsync: copy files directly from the working directory to the remote host
• pull: on the remote host, execute git pull in the application directory
• setup: run make install on the remote host
• ipython: enter an ipython shell on the remote host
• shell: open a bash shell on the remote host
• restart: restart the remote application server
• nginx_restart: restert the remote web server
• logs: view the application logs

Customizing Fabric

Because all systems are different, it is not too likely that all of the commands in fabfile.py will work. However, this at least provides a starting point.