Question

I have a fabfile with:

env.user = 'deploy'

def infra():
    """You need to use a user that can root itself, deploy cannot without a
    password."""
    put('conf.d/etc/nginx/sites-available/www.foo.hk',
         '/etc/nginx/sites-available/www.foo.hk', use_sudo=True)
     sudo('nginx -s reload',)

Which I run like fab infra -Rservers.

So I thought I could override the user with --user=root or -u root when I run fab infra --user=root but it’s still asking me for a password. However if I change env.user to env.user = 'root' it doesn’t. I can also use the settings context manager like:

def infra(user):
    """You need to use a user that can root itself, deploy cannot without a
    password."""
    with settings(user=user):
        put('conf.d/etc/nginx/sites-available/www.foo.hk',
             '/etc/nginx/sites-available/www.foo.hk', use_sudo=True)
        sudo('nginx -s reload',)

That works when I do fab infra:root -Rservers. So clearly it’s possible to override the setting, but it seems like I can’t from the normal command line flag. Am I doing something wrong?

Answer 1

It’s not currently possible to override the default setting from the command line in the way I would want. There’s a ticket for it though https://github.com/fabric/fabric/issues/680 and it seem like it will be fixed.