Installing a Python package remotely

While dealing with the remote host in the previous recipes, you may have noticed that we need to do a lot of stuff related to the connection setup. For efficient execution, it is desirable that they become abstract and only the relevant high-level part is exposed to the programmers. It is cumbersome and slow to always explicitly set up connections to execute commands remotely.

Fabric (http://fabfile.org/), a third-party Python module, solves this problem. It only exposes as many APIs as can be used to efficiently interact with remote machines.

In this recipe, a simple example of using Fabric will be shown.

Getting ready

We need Fabric to be installed first. You can install Fabric using the Python packing tools, pip or easy_install, as shown in the following command. Fabric relies on the paramiko module, which will be installed automatically:

$ pip install fabric

Currently the default Fabric does not seem to support Python 3. You may install fabric3 to fix this...