Configuring Apache remotely to host a website

Fabric functions can be run as both regular and super users. If you need to host a website in a remote Apache web server, you need the administrative user privileges to create configuration files and restart the web server. This recipe introduces the Fabric sudo() function that runs commands in the remote machine as a superuser. Here, we would like to configure the Apache virtual host for running a website.

Getting ready

This recipe needs Fabric to be installed first on your local machine. You can install Fabric using the Python packing tools, pip or easy_install, as shown in the following command:

$ pip install fabric

Here, we will connect the remote host using the SSH protocol. So, it's necessary to install and run the SSH server on the remote host. It is also assumed that the Apache web server is installed and running on the remote server. On a Debian/Ubuntu machine, this can be done with the package manager, apt-get, as shown in the following...