[Fab-user] Survey: Do you wish you run chef, ansible, puppet or saltstack type commands in fabric?

[Tony Narlock]

Hi Fabric users,

I wanted to get an idea of how much of a desire there is for this.

I use both Fabric and a Configuration management system called Salt on my projects.  Salt is permissively licensed and and has a superb, pythonic architecture. I love salt for it's relatively simple declarative configs, but most importantly, it's automated detection of remote systems, module library and state library.

The issue is - there is a huge void in many projects where they're not big enough to warrant the upkeep of maintaining configuration manager recipes, but fabfile's tasks are starting to duplicate functionality a config manager would normally handle. Also if working on a team, there's the issue of colleagues being willing to accept a learning curve.

Fabric is an easier pill to swallow. As a task runner, it's front-end implementation is more nimble that a configuration manager for small-to-medium complexity scenarios.

Fabric has two projects so far that imitate configuration manager require / states / cookbooks:

- Cuisine: https://github.com/sebastien/cuisine

- Fabtools https://github.com/ronnix/fabtools

Fabtools has worked like a charm for me - with the exception that requires are nowhere near as resilient as salt states.

As an example, task a look at ``salt.states.git.latest`` handling of edge cases, compared to ``fabtools.requires.git.working_copy``:

- Salt: https://github.com/saltstack/salt/blob/000de9597475afa59b0cd6c7c1f6c3dc1c66a0bc/salt/states/git.py#L39

Fabtools: https://github.com/ronnix/fabtools/blob/85f5828c84351a91c29bd2be1544d1922a36f436/fabtools/require/git.py#L51

Saltstack's states are also backed by tests: https://github.com/saltstack/salt/blob/000de9597475afa59b0cd6c7c1f6c3dc1c66a0bc/tests/unit/states/git_test.py.

This is just one example of how salt maintains a superb depth / breadth of remote system execution commands / recipes. Another way to put it into perspective:

http://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/ref/modules/all/salt.modules.git.html is to http://fabtools.readthedocs.org/en/latest/api/git.html

like http://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/ref/states/all/salt.states.git.html is to http://fabtools.readthedocs.org/en/latest/api/require/git.html

I have a *very rough* proof of concept demo: https://gist.github.com/tony/6d8d975c817d2e4d43dd

Without delving into the complexities of things technically - I want to get an idea from your POV and experiences with your fabric projects:

- does you here have any sort of gap to fill with fabric where you would benefit from stuff like:

  # make sure vim pkg is installed and latest, if not, install/update

  debpkg.latest('vim')

  # make sure nginx an nginx site has config file as a template

  # in /etc/nginx/sites.avail, linked, and service is, running

  nginx.running(**settings)

- would anything inside of  / salt.modules.* [1] salt.states.* [2] be helpful to you if you could access it pythonically via fabric?

- Do you already use a tool like cuisine / fabric and wish you had access to more commands/requires/cookbooks?

Thank you!

Tony Narlock

[1] http://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/ref/modules/all/salt.modules.git.html

[2]  http://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/ref/states/all/salt.states.git.html