fab-classic is a Python (2.7 or 3.4+) library and command-line tool for streamlining the use of SSH for application deployment or systems administration tasks.
fab-classic is forked from Fabric 1.14 and is intended to add only bug fixes and compatibility patches, for projects already using Fabric-1.x in some way. It includes python3 compatibility patches from Fabric3.
Upstream Fabric is now on version 2.x. Fabric-2.x is python3 compatible, and comes after Fabric3. Fabric-2.x has significant compatibility-breaking changes, in order to fix some long-standing limitations.
fab-classic is on PyPI,
so you can pip install fab-classic
Be sure to pip uninstall fabric first if you happen to have it installed,
because fab-classic uses the same import name "fabric" and entrypoint (tool)
name "fab".
Starting with version 1.16, fab-classic depends on
paramiko-ng instead of
paramiko. Both of those packages
are imported with the name paramiko, and unfortunately that means that you
should make sure you uninstall paramiko before paramiko-ng is installed,
or you will get strange issues (even if things seem to work at first).
Starting with version 1.18, you can switch back to depending on the package
named paramiko by setting the environment variable PARAMIKO_REPLACE=1
while installing fab-classic:
PARAMIKO_REPLACE=1 pip install --no-binary fab-classic fab-classic==1.18.0
(paramiko-ng also supports PARAMIKO_REPLACE,
see paramiko-ng#installation)
API Documentation: https://ploxiln.github.io/fab-classic/
Changelog: https://github.com/ploxiln/fab-classic/releases
For a quick command reference, run fab --help
fab-classic provides a basic suite of operations for executing local or remote shell
commands (normally or via sudo) and uploading/downloading files, as well as
auxiliary functionality such as prompting the running user for input, or
aborting execution.
Typical use involves creating a Python module containing one or more functions,
then executing them via the fab command-line tool. Below is a small but
complete "fabfile" containing a single task:
from fabric.api import run
def host_type():
run('uname -s')If you save the above as fabfile.py (the default module that
fab loads), you can run the tasks defined in it on one or more
servers, like so:
$ fab -H localhost,linuxbox host_type [localhost] run: uname -s [localhost] out: Darwin [linuxbox] run: uname -s [linuxbox] out: Linux Done. Disconnecting from localhost... done. Disconnecting from linuxbox... done.
In addition to use via the fab tool, Fabric's components may be imported
into other Python code, providing a Pythonic interface to the SSH protocol
suite at a higher level than that provided by the paramiko-ng library
(which Fabric itself uses).