Published at May 28, 2012 | Tagged with: Python , Django , Fabric , Development

Or how automate the creation of new projects with simple script

Preface: Do you remember all this tiny little steps that you have to perform every time when you start new project - create virtual environment, install packages, start and setup Django project? Kind of annoying repetition, isn't it? How about to automate it a bit.

Solution: Recently I started learning Fabric and thought "What better way to test it in practice than automating a simple, repetitive task?". So, lets mark the tasks that I want the script to perform:

Create virtual environment with the project name Activate the virtual environment Download list of packages and install them Make 'src' directory where the project source will reside Create new Django project in source directory Update the settings

Thanks to the local command the first one was easy. The problem was with the second one. Obviously each local command is run autonomously so I had to find some way have activated virtual environment for each task after this. Fortunately the prefix context manager works like a charm. I had some issues making it read and write in the paths I wants and voilà it was working exactly as I want.

The script is too long to place it here but is publicly available at https://gist.github.com/2818562

It is quite simple to use, you only need python, fabric and virtual environment. Then just use the following code.



fab start_project : my_mew_project

To Do: Here are few things that can be improved:

Read the packages from a file

Update urls.py to enable admin

Generate Nginx server block file

So this is my first try with Fabric, I hope that you will like it and find it useful. As always any comments, questions and/or improvement ideas are welcome.