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django-fabtastic

Deploying Django projects is not an inherently fun task. It's not an extremely difficult process, however, there are plenty of tedious, repetitive tasks that take precious time and keystrokes.

Each person or company handles their deployments in a slightly different manner. There are a near infinite number of ways to deploy, maintain, and update Django projects, each with their own benefits and limitations. django-fabtastic is DUO Interactive's philosophy on deployment, and is what we use for our own projects.

This Django app can be dropped into any project, providing you with a quick, easy, standardized deployment method.

Why would I use fabtastic?

These are just based on what we wanted in a deployment system, so you may not find these to be compelling reasons for your project(s).

  • We like Python, and wanted a simple Python-based deployment solution.
  • We like Fabric. It's simple and works really well for us.
  • We did not like maintaining a mess of slightly different fabfiles for our handful of projects in production and development. Whenever an enhancement was made to one, we had to spend time porting it to the other projects for them to benefit from the enhancements.
  • Our deployments were similar enough to pretty much do the same exact steps to deploy them all. We can now toss the example fabfile.py into each of our projects, add fabtastic to our Django settings.py, and we're on our way to worrying about more important stuff like developing the product.

Notes and assumptions

django-fabtastic does not attempt to be a one-size-fits-all solution. It is aimed at what we need for our deployments. As is such, if you need a feature implemented, feel free to open an issue in the tracker, or better yet, fork and send a pull request.

As far as assumptions we make for those wishing to use this app:

  • You are running Django 1.1 or higher.
  • We strongly recommend Python 2.6+, but not 3.x (yet). It very well may run just fine on earlier Python versions, but we have done no testing below Python 2.6.
  • You are using or wanting to use Fabric.
  • We currently only implement Postgres DB operations. We'd love patches for others, though.
  • You are using virtualenv_ and virtualenvwrapper_.

Philosophy

We like Django. We like Fabric. Fabric is [thankfully] not at all tied to Django, which is great. However, we found ourselves juggling Django settings and environment stuff way too often. We also found ourselves wishing we could just run certain segments of the deployment process in-place on an arbitrary server or staging or development machine without any thought.

Fabric can do this just fine, but we didn't like cluttering our fabfile with all of the extra sub-sections of our deployment process. We also realized that our deployment scripts being ran entirely from a client machine meant that some really bad assumptions were being made:

  • The values in all of our local settings.py (and deployment/staging settings) are always in sync with what's in production.
  • No overridden (local_settings.py, anyone?) values exist in production.

These caused us some grief, as we tend to keep sensitive settings out of our git repositories. The best way to overcome the aformentioned limitations and correct our assumptions was to chunk the deployment process out into manage.py commands and some includable Fabric scripts that call them as needed.

In this way, we find ourselves with a useful set of management and deployment commands that are guaranteed to always have the correct settings and Django environment on all of our machines: local, staging, or production.

Installation

Right now, Fabtastic is only available via our github repository. Fortunately, pip can pull directly from it.

  • Add git+http://github.com/duointeractive/django-fabtastic.git#egg=fabtastic to your requirements.txt file.
  • Run pip install git+http://github.com/duointeractive/django-fabtastic.git#egg=fabtastic manually to install it.
  • Add fabtastic to your INSTALLED_APPS` in settings.py.
  • If you run ./manage.py help, you should now see some more commands.
  • Read on to the fabfile.py construction section in this README. Generally you can copy the example fabfile.py to your project and modify it as needed.

Staying up to date

At any time, you may run ./manage.py ft_fabtastic_update to get the latest version. There is also a Fabric task included, fabtastic_update.

fabfile.py Construction

If you downloaded the source distribution, take a look at your examples/ directory. The most common example will be in fabfile.py. If you installed via pip, you can point your browser at it here to follow along.

The important thing to note is that all we are doing in the fabfile is pulling whatever we want together. You are free to mix in your own custom commands, selectively use ours, or use all of ours plus some of your own.

django-fabtastic is primarily for DUO's deployments, so some of it is aimed to fit our usage case. As is such, unless you use all of our dependencies, the following line might need to be made a little more specific:

from fabtastic.fabric.commands import *

It is important to note that you can selectively import commands from fabtastic.fabric.commands. See the note and example in examples/fabfile.py. For a full list of modules, check your fabtastic/fabric/commands directory, or look at our git repository.