Joel's Pointers

Fabric is a cool little package to script (remote) commands and can be very useful for things like deploys to a variety of servers. I’m using it to deploy my Django app.

I run windows (64bit) however, and it took me a while to find the right links to all of the right binaries and packages. This “recipe” however has the following assumptions:

• You have python installed (2.7 in my case)
• You have pip installed 

If you try “pip install fabric”, you’ll likely get an error about a crypto library missing. Install Pycrypto and Paramiko from here:

http://blog.victorjabur.com/2011/06/08/modules-python-library-compiled-for-windows-32-and-64-unofficial-windows-binaries-for-python/

Note you’ll have to run the installer as administrator (right click, “Run as Administrator”), because the installer will crash if you don’t.

The third required package is the win32api. That package is available here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pywin32/files/pywin32/Build216/ Be sure to pick the right python version and architecture (pywin32-216.win-amd64-py2.7.exe in my case).

Now you can run “pip install fabric” and have a happy fabric install. Happy deploys!