Installing (1.x)¶
Note
Installing Fabric 2.0 or above? Looking for non-PyPI downloads or source code checkout instructions? See Installing.
This document includes legacy notes on installing Fabric 1.x. Users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to 2.x when possible.
Basic installation¶
Fabric is best installed via pip; to ensure you
get Fabric 1 instead of the new but incompatible Fabric 2, specify <2.0
:
$ pip install 'fabric<2.0'
All advanced pip
use cases work too, such as installing the latest copy of
the v1
development branch:
$ pip install -e 'git+https://github.com/fabric/fabric@v1#egg=fabric'
Or cloning the Git repository and running:
$ git checkout v1
$ pip install -e .
within it.
Your operating system may also have a Fabric package available (though these
are typically older and harder to support), typically called fabric
or
python-fabric
. E.g.:
$ sudo apt-get install fabric
Note
Make sure to confirm which major version is currently packaged!
Dependencies¶
In order for Fabric’s installation to succeed, you will need four primary pieces of software:
the Python programming language;
the
setuptools
packaging/installation library;the Python Paramiko SSH library;
and Paramiko’s dependency, Cryptography.
and, if using parallel execution mode,
the multiprocessing library.
Please read on for important details on each dependency – there are a few gotchas.
Python¶
Fabric requires Python version 2.5+.
setuptools¶
Setuptools comes with most Python installations by default; if yours
doesn’t, you’ll need to grab it. In such situations it’s typically packaged as
python-setuptools
, py26-setuptools
or similar.
multiprocessing
¶
An optional dependency, the multiprocessing
library is included in Python’s
standard library in version 2.6 and higher. If you’re using Python 2.5 and want
to make use of Fabric’s parallel execution features you’ll need to install it
manually; the recommended route, as usual, is via pip
. Please see the
multiprocessing PyPI page for
details.
Warning
Early versions of Python 2.6 (in our testing, 2.6.0 through 2.6.2) ship
with a buggy multiprocessing
module that appears to cause Fabric to
hang at the end of sessions involving large numbers of concurrent hosts.
If you encounter this problem, either use env.pool_size
/ -z
to
limit the amount of concurrency, or upgrade to Python
>=2.6.3.
Python 2.5 is unaffected, as it requires the PyPI version of
multiprocessing
, which is newer than that shipped with Python <2.6.3.