when to use fabric or ansible?

Question

OVERVIEW

I'd like to have reliable django deployments and I think I'm not following the best practices here. Till now I've been using fabric as a configuration management tool in order to deploy my django sites but I'm not sure that's the best way to go.

In the high performance django book there is a warning which says:

Fabric is not a configuration management tool. Trying to use it as one will ultimately cause you heartache and pain. Fabric is an excellent choice for executing scripts in one or more remote systems, but that's only a small piece of the puzzle. Don't reinvent the wheel by building your own configuration management system on top of fabric

So, I've decided I want to learn ansible.

QUESTIONS

• Does it make sense using both fabric and ansible tools somehow?
• Is it possible to use ansible from my windows development environment to deploy to production centos(6/7) servers?
• There is this nice site https://galaxy.ansible.com/ which contains a lot of playbooks, any good recommendation to deploy django on centos servers?

Answer 1

Does it make sense using both fabric and ansible tools somehow?

Yes. All your logic should live in Ansible and you can use Fabric as a lightweight wrapper around it.

fab deploy

is easier to remember than, e.g.

ansible-playbook -v --inventory=production --tags=app site.yml

Is it possible to use ansible from my windows development environment to deploy to production centos(6/7) servers?

Sounds like you can't. Alternatively, If you use Fabric, it could copy your ansible playbooks up to a server (or pull directly from git) and run ansible from there.