Question

Is fabric suitable for a new VPS setup like Linode or SliceHost?

The setup is explained in this slicehost article

The required actions are basically:

• changing root password
• creating a new user and group
• add the group to the list of sudoers
• set hostname
• generate local ssh keys and upload securely the public key
• set iptables

If fabric is not the tool, is there a better tool for this?

Thanks

Answer 1

Fabric would work very well for these tasks. Essentially anything you do over SSH can be automated with Fabric. It also allows you to upload and download files.

You would probably generate your local keys by invoking shell commands locally; but everything else is in fabric’s domain.