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".

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)

Documentation

API Documentation:

Changelog:

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).