Installing¶

fab-classic is best installed via pip

$ pip install fab-classic

Make sure that “Fabric” and “paramiko” packages are removed first, if you happen to have previously installed them (because fab-classic depends on Paramiko-NG).

If you are upgrading fab-classic from version 1.15.x to version 1.16 or later, then you do have “paramiko” installed as a dependency for fab-classic 1.15.x, and you should uninstall it first:

$ pip uninstall paramiko

It is also possible to install fab-classic such that it requires “paramiko” instead of “paramiko-ng”:

PARAMIKO_REPLACE=1 pip install --no-binary fab-classic fab-classic==1.18.0

(paramiko-ng also supports PARAMIKO_REPLACE, see paramiko-ng#installation)

Advanced users wanting to install a development version may use pip to grab the latest master branch (as well as the dev version of the Paramiko-NG dependency):

$ pip install -e git+https://github.com/ploxiln/paramiko-ng/#egg=paramiko-ng
$ pip install -e git+https://github.com/ploxiln/fab-classic/#egg=fab-classic

Dependencies¶

In order for Fabric’s installation to succeed, you will need three primary pieces of software:

the Python programming language version 2.7, or version 3.4, or a later 3.x release;
the setuptools packaging/installation library;
and the Python Paramiko-NG SSH library. See the Paramiko installation docs for more info.

setuptools¶

Setuptools comes with some Python installations by default; if yours doesn’t, you’ll need to grab it. In such situations it’s typically packaged as python-setuptools, py27-setuptools or similar.

Development dependencies¶

If you are interested in doing development work on Fabric (or even just running the test suite), you may also need to install some or all of the following packages:

git in order to obtain some of the other dependencies below;
Nose
Fudge
Sphinx

For an up-to-date list of exact testing/development requirements, including version numbers, please see the dev-requirements.txt file included with the source distribution. This file is intended to be used with pip, e.g. pip install -r dev-requirements.txt.

Downloads¶

To obtain a tar.gz or zip archive of the Fabric source code, you may visit Fabric’s PyPI page, which offers manual downloads in addition to being the entry point for pip

Source code checkouts¶

The Fabric developers manage the project’s source code with the Git DVCS. To follow Fabric’s development via Git instead of downloading official releases, you have the following options:

Clone the canonical repository straight from the Fabric organization’s repository on Github, git://github.com/ploxiln/fab-classic.git
Make your own fork of the Github repository by making a Github account, visiting ploxiln/fab-classic and clicking the “fork” button.

Note

If you’ve obtained the Fabric source via source control and plan on updating your checkout in the future, we highly suggest using python setup.py develop instead – it will use symbolic links instead of file copies, ensuring that imports of the library or use of the command-line tool will always refer to your checkout.