I've been working, in my spare time, on a really fun Django project. It's allowed me to play with some of the Django toys that I haven't really gotten around to playing with recently. One of the things I've been doing is building my app with good tools, and one of things I've been doing in building my tools is using custom django management commands.

Out of this process came a tool that I thought might be beneficial to share with others: django-fabric. Fabric is a command line tool similar to the popular development tool Capistrano. However, it's more lightweight, uses python, and doesn't assume anything about your environment (language, vcs, etc.). I've been using it so much recently that I built a django command for it.

To use it, download, install, and add to your INSTALLED_APPS. Create a fabfile, which is just a python file with your deployment instructions in them. You'll need to add that file (by name) as settings.FABFILE. Then, manage.py fab <command>. For more information, see the Fabric documentation.

For Ubuntu users, Fabric can be installed by adding my PPA repository and installing from there. I'll be adding the django-fabric packange there too, once I get it to a stable point.