Installing Homebrew & Fabric on OSX 10.9 Mavericks

I’ve just upgraded my Mac at work to 10.9.1 Mavericks. No messing about – completely clean install on a formatted disc. Last year I wrote a quick post about installing Fabric on my Mac, this is an update of that post to reflect a few changes.

If you don’t know…

Fabric is a Python (2.5 or higher) library and command-line tool for streamlining the use of SSH for application deployment or systems administration tasks.

I think Fabric is a good solution to manage the deployment of websites and applications – it is an integral part of my workflow these days.

Homebrew is a package manager for OSX and is an alternative to the commonly used MacPorts. You can find out a bit more about the differences between them in this thread on arstechnica.

Install Command Line Developer Tools

These were previously part of Xcode but now need to be installed separately, open a terminal and type:

xcode-select --install

…and follow the prompts.

Install Homebrew

The address of the download appears to have chnaged slightly since last year…

ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/go/install)"

…and follow the prompts.

When you see the successful installation message, type:

brew doctor

This will alert you to any problems that you need to resolve.

If everything is good you should see the following message:

Your system is ready to brew.

Install Git, Python and Fabric

brew install git
brew install python

You now need to edit your system paths so that Python can be found:

I edited my .bashrc file: nano ~/.bashrc and added the following line:

export PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:~/bin:$PATH

And then /etc/paths sudo nano /etc/paths so that usr/local/bin (the location of packages installed by Homebrew) is first:

/usr/local/bin

/usr/local/sbin

/usr/bin

/bin

/usr/sbin

/sbin

And finally install Fabric. There isn’t a Homebrew package available by default, so I just installed Fabric using pip – the pip package manager for Python is installed at as part of Python.

pip install fabric

Check if it works…

Let’s check and see if everything has worked…

$ fab

Fatal error: Couldn\'t find any fabfiles!

Remember that -f can be used to specify fabfile path, and use -h for help.

Aborting.

In this case the Fatal error is good. It means that Fabric has installed correctly and you now need to write some fab files.