Ansible vs Capistrano vs Fabric

Overview

Capistrano

Stacks1.5K

Followers647

Votes232

GitHub Stars12.9K

Forks1.8K

Fabric

Stacks494

Followers307

Votes75

GitHub Stars15.3K

Forks2.0K

Ansible

Stacks19.5K

Followers15.6K

Votes1.3K

GitHub Stars66.9K

Forks24.1K

Ansible vs Capistrano vs Fabric: What are the differences?

## Key Differences between Ansible, Capistrano, and Fabric

Ansible, Capistrano, and Fabric are all popular deployment automation tools, each with its own set of unique features and functionalities. Below are the key differences between the three tools.

1. **Architecture**: Ansible utilizes an agentless architecture, while Capistrano and Fabric both require agents to be installed on the target servers. This difference can impact the ease of deployment and management, as the agentless model in Ansible simplifies the setup process and reduces the overhead on target servers.
   
2. **Language**: Capistrano is primarily written in Ruby, making it more suitable for Ruby-centric environments, whereas Fabric is written in Python, which is a better choice for Python developers. Ansible, on the other hand, uses YAML for configuration management, providing a more human-readable and easy-to-understand syntax for defining playbooks.

3. **Configuration Management**: Ansible is known for its declarative approach to configuration management, allowing users to define the desired state of the system without specifying each step. Capistrano and Fabric, on the other hand, use an imperative style, where users need to define the exact steps to be executed during deployment.

4. **Community Support**: Ansible boasts a large and active community that continually contributes playbooks, roles, and modules to the Ansible Galaxy repository. Capistrano and Fabric also have supportive communities, but they may not be as extensive or well-established as the Ansible community.

5. **Scalability**: Ansible is designed to scale up to manage hundreds or thousands of servers simultaneously, making it a preferred choice for large-scale deployments. While Capistrano and Fabric can also handle multiple servers, Ansible's scalability features make it stand out for enterprise-level deployments.

6. **Extensibility**: Ansible provides a robust plugin system that allows users to extend its functionality through custom modules, plugins, and playbooks. Capistrano and Fabric offer some level of extensibility, but they may not provide the same level of flexibility and customization as Ansible.

In Summary, when choosing between Ansible, Capistrano, and Fabric, consider factors such as architecture, language compatibility, configuration management style, community support, scalability, and extensibility to determine the best tool for your deployment automation needs.

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Advice on Capistrano, Fabric, Ansible

Rogério

Software Developer

Aug 10, 2021

Needs adviceon

Docker

Git

Linux

Personal Dotfiles management

Given that they are all “configuration management” tools - meaning they are designed to deploy, configure and manage servers - what would be the simplest - and yet robust - solution to manage personal dotfiles - for n00bs.

Ideally, I reckon, it should:

be containerized (@{Docker}|tool:586|?)
be versionable (@{Git}|tool:1046|)
ensure idempotency
allow full automation (tests, CI/CD, etc.)
be fully recoverable (@{Linux}|tool:10483|/ @{macOS}|tool:5560|)
be easier to setup/manage (as much as possible)

Does it make sense?

282k views282k

Comments

ajit

Jan 12, 2022

Needs adviceon

Rundeck

Ansible

Jenkins

We have a lot of operations running using Rundeck (including deployments) and we also have various roles created in Ansible for infrastructure creation, which we execute using Rundeck. Rundeck we are using a community edition. Since we are already using Rundeck for executing the Ansible role, need an advice. What difference will it make if we replace Rundeck with Ansible Tower? Advantages and Disadvantages? We are using Jenkins to call Rundeck Job, same will be used for Ansible Tower if we replace Rundeck.

110k views110k

Comments

Anonymous

Sep 17, 2019

Needs advice

I'm just getting started using Vagrant to help automate setting up local VMs to set up a Kubernetes cluster (development and experimentation only). (Yes, I do know about minikube)

I'm looking for a tool to help install software packages, setup users, etc..., on these VMs. I'm also fairly new to Ansible, Chef, and Puppet. What's a good one to start with to learn? I might decide to try all 3 at some point for my own curiosity.

The most important factors for me are simplicity, ease of use, shortest learning curve.

329k views329k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Capistrano	Fabric	Ansible
Capistrano is a remote server automation tool. It supports the scripting and execution of arbitrary tasks, and includes a set of sane-default deployment workflows.	Fabric is a Python (2.5-2.7) library and command-line tool for streamlining the use of SSH for application deployment or systems administration tasks. It provides a basic suite of operations for executing local or remote shell commands (normally or via sudo) and uploading/downloading files, as well as auxiliary functionality such as prompting the running user for input, or aborting execution.	Ansible is an IT automation tool. It can configure systems, deploy software, and orchestrate more advanced IT tasks such as continuous deployments or zero downtime rolling updates. Ansible’s goals are foremost those of simplicity and maximum ease of use.
Reliably deploy web application to any number of machines simultaneously, in sequence or as a rolling set;Automate audits of any number of machines (checking login logs, enumerating uptimes, and/or applying security patches);Script arbitrary workflows over SSH;Automate common tasks in software teams;Drive infrastructure provisioning tools such as chef-solo, Ansible or similar	Lets you execute arbitrary Python functions via the command line;Library of subroutines (built on top of a lower-level library) to make executing shell commands over SSH easy and Pythonic	Ansible's natural automation language allows sysadmins, developers, and IT managers to complete automation projects in hours, not weeks.;Ansible uses SSH by default instead of requiring agents everywhere. Avoid extra open ports, improve security, eliminate "managing the management", and reclaim CPU cycles.;Ansible automates app deployment, configuration management, workflow orchestration, and even cloud provisioning all from one system.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 12.9K	GitHub Stars 15.3K	GitHub Stars 66.9K
GitHub Forks 1.8K	GitHub Forks 2.0K	GitHub Forks 24.1K
Stacks 1.5K	Stacks 494	Stacks 19.5K
Followers 647	Followers 307	Followers 15.6K
Votes 232	Votes 75	Votes 1.3K
Pros & Cons
Pros 121 Automated deployment with several custom recipes 63 Simple 23 Ruby 11 Release-folders with symlinks 9 Multistage deployment	Pros 23 Python 21 Simple 5 Low learning curve, from bash script to Python power 5 Installation feedback for Twitter App Cards 3 Agentless	Pros 284 Agentless 210 Great configuration 199 Simple 176 Powerful 155 Easy to learn Cons 8 Dangerous 5 Hard to install 3 Bloated 3 Backward compatibility 3 Doesn't Run on Windows
Integrations
No integrations available	No integrations available	Nexmo Stackdriver VMware vSphere Docker OpenStack Amazon EC2 Rackspace Cloud Servers Google Compute Engine New Relic PagerDuty

What are some alternatives to Capistrano, Fabric, Ansible?

Chef

Chef enables you to manage and scale cloud infrastructure with no downtime or interruptions. Freely move applications and configurations from one cloud to another. Chef is integrated with all major cloud providers including Amazon EC2, VMWare, IBM Smartcloud, Rackspace, OpenStack, Windows Azure, HP Cloud, Google Compute Engine, Joyent Cloud and others.

Terraform

With Terraform, you describe your complete infrastructure as code, even as it spans multiple service providers. Your servers may come from AWS, your DNS may come from CloudFlare, and your database may come from Heroku. Terraform will build all these resources across all these providers in parallel.

Puppet Labs

Puppet is an automated administrative engine for your Linux, Unix, and Windows systems and performs administrative tasks (such as adding users, installing packages, and updating server configurations) based on a centralized specification.

Salt

Salt is a new approach to infrastructure management. Easy enough to get running in minutes, scalable enough to manage tens of thousands of servers, and fast enough to communicate with them in seconds. Salt delivers a dynamic communication bus for infrastructures that can be used for orchestration, remote execution, configuration management and much more.

AWS OpsWorks

Start from templates for common technologies like Ruby, Node.JS, PHP, and Java, or build your own using Chef recipes to install software packages and perform any task that you can script. AWS OpsWorks can scale your application using automatic load-based or time-based scaling and maintain the health of your application by detecting failed instances and replacing them. You have full control of deployments and automation of each component

cPanel

It is an industry leading hosting platform with world-class support. It is globally empowering hosting providers through fully-automated point-and-click hosting platform by hosting-centric professionals

Webmin

It is a web-based interface for system administration for Unix. Using any modern web browser, you can setup user accounts, Apache, DNS, file sharing and much more. It removes the need to manually edit Unix configuration files.

Mina

Mina works really fast because it's a deploy Bash script generator. It generates an entire procedure as a Bash script and runs it remotely in the server. Compare this to the likes of Vlad or Capistrano, where each command is run separately on their own SSH sessions. Mina only creates one SSH session per deploy, minimizing the SSH connection overhead.

Puppet Bolt

It is an open source orchestration tool that automates the manual work it takes to maintain your infrastructure. Use it to automate tasks that you perform on an as-needed basis or as part of a greater orchestration workflow.

Rundeck

A self-service operations platform used for support tasks, enterprise job scheduling, deployment, and more.

Related Comparisons

Ansible vs Capistrano vs Fabric: What are the differences?

## Key Differences between Ansible, Capistrano, and Fabric

Ansible, Capistrano, and Fabric are all popular deployment automation tools, each with its own set of unique features and functionalities. Below are the key differences between the three tools.

1. **Architecture**: Ansible utilizes an agentless architecture, while Capistrano and Fabric both require agents to be installed on the target servers. This difference can impact the ease of deployment and management, as the agentless model in Ansible simplifies the setup process and reduces the overhead on target servers.
   
2. **Language**: Capistrano is primarily written in Ruby, making it more suitable for Ruby-centric environments, whereas Fabric is written in Python, which is a better choice for Python developers. Ansible, on the other hand, uses YAML for configuration management, providing a more human-readable and easy-to-understand syntax for defining playbooks.

3. **Configuration Management**: Ansible is known for its declarative approach to configuration management, allowing users to define the desired state of the system without specifying each step. Capistrano and Fabric, on the other hand, use an imperative style, where users need to define the exact steps to be executed during deployment.

4. **Community Support**: Ansible boasts a large and active community that continually contributes playbooks, roles, and modules to the Ansible Galaxy repository. Capistrano and Fabric also have supportive communities, but they may not be as extensive or well-established as the Ansible community.

5. **Scalability**: Ansible is designed to scale up to manage hundreds or thousands of servers simultaneously, making it a preferred choice for large-scale deployments. While Capistrano and Fabric can also handle multiple servers, Ansible's scalability features make it stand out for enterprise-level deployments.

6. **Extensibility**: Ansible provides a robust plugin system that allows users to extend its functionality through custom modules, plugins, and playbooks. Capistrano and Fabric offer some level of extensibility, but they may not provide the same level of flexibility and customization as Ansible.

In Summary, when choosing between Ansible, Capistrano, and Fabric, consider factors such as architecture, language compatibility, configuration management style, community support, scalability, and extensibility to determine the best tool for your deployment automation needs.

Ansible vs Capistrano vs Fabric

Overview