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.

Install

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".

Documentation

API Documentation: https://ploxiln.github.io/fab-classic/

Changelog: https://github.com/ploxiln/fab-classic/releases

For a quick command reference, run fab --help

Usage Introduction

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).