TL;DR Wrapper for Fabric and Cuisine to achieve a clean, simple and fun to use interface amplified with new high-level functions to quickly orchestrate your servers.

Let me introduce you two other awesome tools / libraries, before I try to explain the gap Revolver tries to fill. First there is Fabric, a very small and low-level wrapper around SSH written in Python. It allows you to store a small fabfile.py next to your project, where you can define all the steps required to automate something via SSH on one to multiple servers (e.g. install and configure your software stack, deploy new versions, ...).

But Fabric is really low-level and there is a lack of fun. That's the point where Cuisine joins the ring, because it's a collection of useful methods which really increases your amount of fun and pleasure. Unfortunately with some small, but really annoying, differences that are sometimes even incompatible. Some examples?

# Fabric
run('apt-get install XYZ', use_sudo=True)

# Cuisine
with mode_sudo():
    run('apt-get install XYZ')

I really enjoy the contextmanager for running a block as superuser! But Cuisine didn't patch all commands provided by Fabric (run() in the example is patched but other commands, like put(), aren't and you'll run into strange / annoying errors).

There is also a different scheme of naming things. Fabric tends to use short function names inside clean namespaces (e.g fabric.contrib.files.append). But the API of Cuisine, on the other hand, follows <object>_<operation> (e.g. cuisine.file_append).

Both ways are reasonable and I don't wanna blame someone! Don't get me wrong! I simply want a "cleaner" or "more compatible" API which I can extend with my own new functions and keep the level of fun and pleasure high (at least for me). And the last sentence is a short / good description of what Revolver is about. Just a "unification" wrapper for Fabric and Cuisine with some new batteries included.

This project is currently not published to the official python package repository but it should be easy to get everything running:

sudo easy_install https://github.com/michaelcontento/revolver/tarball/master

Or use the new alternate installer Pip:

sudo pip install https://github.com/michaelcontento/revolver/tarball/master#egg=revolver

Now Revolver is installed and ready to use. But I would suggest to first read the documentation from Fabric to get used with the whole workflow / principle. After that it should be easy for you to dig into the code, discover everything and write your first own fabfile.py.

But for those who want to see fast results, here is a small example fabfile.py.

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

from revolver import user
from revolver import contextmanager as ctx
from revolver.project import Deployinator
from revolver.core import env
from revolver.tool import php
from revolver.tool import ruby

env.hosts = ['user@example.com']

def setup():
    php.install(version='5.3.9')
    ruby.ensure(version='1.9.2-p290')
    user.ensure('own-user', home='/var/own-user')

def deploy():
    with ctx.sudo(username='own-user'):
        dp = Deployinator()
        dp.run()

• Fork this project
• Make your changes (new features, bugfixes, examples, ...)
• Write tests for it
• Be sure that all other tests are still green
• Send me a pull request

Too complicated? You just wanna mess around for yourself? Thats fine! Just skip everything after step two :)

Copyright 2009-2012 Michael Contento <michaelcontento@gmail.com>

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You may obtain a copy of the License at

    http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.