How do I copy a directory to a remote machine using Fabric?

I would also look at the Project Tools module: fabric.contrib.project Documentation

This has an upload_project function which takes a source and target directory. Even better, there is an rsync_project function that uses rsync. This is nice because it only updates the files that have changed and it accepts extra args like "exclude" which is nice for doing things like excluding your .git directory.

For example:

from fabric.contrib.project import rsync_project

def _deploy_ec2(loc):

    rsync_project(local_dir=loc, remote_dir='/var/www', exclude='.git')

You can use put for that as well (at least in 1.0.0):

local_path may be a relative or absolute local file or directory path, and may contain shell-style wildcards, as understood by the Python glob module. Tilde expansion (as implemented by os.path.expanduser) is also performed.

See: http://docs.fabfile.org/en/1.0.0/api/core/operations.html#fabric.operations.put

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Update: This example works fine (for me) on 1.0.0.:

from fabric.api import env
from fabric.operations import run, put

env.hosts = ['[email protected]']

def copy():
    # make sure the directory is there!
    run('mkdir -p /home/frodo/tmp')

    # our local 'testdirectory' - it may contain files or subdirectories ...
    put('testdirectory', '/home/frodo/tmp')

# [[email protected]] Executing task 'copy'
# [[email protected]] run: mkdir -p /home/frodo/tmp
# [[email protected]] put: testdirectory/HELLO -> \
#     /home/frodo/tmp/testdirectory/HELLO
# [[email protected]] put: testdirectory/WORLD -> \
#     /home/frodo/tmp/testdirectory/WORLD
# ...

For those using Fabric 2, put can no longer upload directories, only files. Also, rsync_project is no longer part of the main Fabric package. The contrib package has been removed, as explained here. Now, rsync_project has been renamed to rsync, and you need to install another package in order to be able to use it:

pip install patchwork

Now, assuming you already have created a connection to your server:

cxn = fabric.Connection('username@server:22')

You can use rsync as below:

import patchwork.transfers
patchwork.transfers.rsync(cxn, '/my/local/dir', target, exclude='.git')

Please refer to the fabric-patchwork documentation for more information.