Some Fabric tasks for Django projects

Generic tasks

provision

Runs the followintg sub-tasks, which can be run separately:

• create_user
• create_db
• upload_local_public_key
• generate_keypair
• show_public_key
• setup_virtualenv

Django tasks

deploy

Deploy a project, doing all the required magick.

local_to_remote

Deploy, replace remote db and uploaded media with local copies.

manage:commandname

Run arbitrary Django management command.

restart_project

Kill Django instance, which should be restarted by supervisor process.

set_local_setting:name,value,backup

Set settings/_local.py value.

General rules

• host should be accessible through SSH
• local Git repository's remote origin with branch master is used by default to update the project code on the host
• we use PostgreSQL with admin user postgres, db name defaults to env.user
• remote user is in the main group of the same name
• env.poweruser has full sudo privileges, defaults to the running user's name and is used to create user, db, chown operations, etc
• env.type holds the host type and defaults to production and is used for choosing Django settings and PIP requirements files

Remote host package requirements

• Basic development packages (gcc, autotools, openssl, zlib, etc)
• Some supervisor program to run Django WSGI process
• PostgreSQL server (matching local version, if you want to use custom dump files)
• Git, SVN, Mercurial, cURL

Optional requirements

• local db access is granted to env.user (~/.pgpass might help)
• remote db access is granted to the system user with the same name

Example usage

Per-project Fabfile.py

from fabric.api import env
from webdev_fab import set_project_defaults
from webdev_fab.tasks import *
from webdev_fab.tasks.django import *

env.user = 'projname'

# A shortcut to set 'db', 'db_user', 'group' and 'project' values equal
# to 'user', which are required for this tasks to function
set_project_defaults(env.user)

# Everything else is optional

# Default list of hosts to run tasks on
if not env.hosts:
    env.hosts = ['somehost.yourteam.com:2222']

# Fabric can can utilize some ~/.ssh/config shortcuts
env.use_ssh_config = True

# The user with full sudo privileges, defaults to the user running 'fab'
env.poweruser = 'privilegedusername'

# A group to own project/tmp directory with fcgi socket/pid files, defaults
# to 'nginx'
env.webserver_group = 'www-data'

Essential command line examples

fab -l
fab provision
fab local_to_remote
git commit -a -m "Some changes" && git push && fab deploy

Links

This project is used in a custom django basic project template and Chef/knife-solo based django-kitchen.