Fabric itself takes a little effort to setup, but it's worth it.
The Fabric community is quite active, and we will use the latest version.
We will run Fabric from Python's virtualenv, which isolates the installation in a virtual environment that is easy to remove and re-install.
If you do not already have virtualenv installed, do that first:
sudo apt-get install python-virtualenv
and use the (outdated) Ubuntu fabric package to install Fabric's dependencies (such as compiler and python header files required for the crypto library):
apt-cache depends fabric | grep Depends: | sed 's/^ *Depends: //' | xargs sudo apt-get ---yes install
sudo apt-get --yes install python-dev
You need a system compiler. If you have a developer.apple.com account you can download and install the command-line tools separately; if not, download Xcode from the App Store, and install the "Command Line Tools" component in the Downloads pane in Preferences.
You need a recent Python, pip, and virtual_env. I strongly recommend homebrew, so you can install a fresh python and virtualenv with:
brew install python
sudo pip install virtualenv
Now we can create a virtualenv to install fabric into:
VIRTUAL_ENV_DIR=$HOME/fabric
virtualenv "$VIRTUAL_ENV_DIR"
source "$VIRTUAL_ENV_DIR/bin/activate"
This will change your bash prompt to include a "(fabric)" prefix. Whenever you want to run fabric, just re-activate your virtualenv with that source command.
And, finally, we're ready to actually install Fabric:
pip install fabric jinja2
To verify you can run it, invoke it to print out its versions:
(fabric)mak@crab$ fab -V
Fabric 1.5.1
Paramiko 1.9.0
Yay!