fabric experimental

Shell, sync and files

fabric has a few services of its own. They all ride the same trusted, resumable transport as expose and dial, and each is off for a peer until you grant it.

Remote shell and exec#

fabric shell machine-b

fabric shell gives you a real interactive terminal on the peer, like ssh -t, so job control and full-screen programs work. It rides a resumable tunnel: a network blip, a roaming laptop or a short outage reconnects you to the same remote shell instead of killing it. A longer outage, past a window of 15 minutes by default, ends the session.

For a shell that stays put however long you're away, attach to a pty session over fabric instead.

fabric exec machine-b -- <command> runs a single command with piped input and output, and no terminal.

Both need an opt-in for the whole daemon on the target machine, on top of the peer's grant.

Folder sync#

A sync entry ties a logical name to a local folder on each machine. The daemon watches the folder and converges it with trusted peers.

[[sync]]
name   = "notes"                  # the same name on every machine
folder = "/abs/path/to/notes"     # can differ on each machine
peers  = "*"

• Conflicts are settled by logical versions, never by file times, which aren't reliable across machines.
• Deletes propagate as tombstones that are kept, so a deleted file can't quietly come back.
• It syncs what git tracks: file content and the executable bit. Symlinks and permission-only changes don't sync.

Anything that appears in a synced folder is synced as a real file, so stage temporary files somewhere else.

Sending a file#

fabric send-file delivers one file to a peer, in one direction, like scp. The receiver decides where it lands: everything arrives in a per-sender inbox on the receiving machine, and the sender can't write anywhere else.

Coming#

Git remotes over fabric, to clone and push between machines with the same trust and grants, are in progress.