I can't speak for Chef/Puppet but I tried in the past to incorporate Fabric into my workflow but I couldn't find a fabfile that worked out of the box with my se

I can't speak for Chef/Puppet but I tried in the past to incorporate Fabric into my workflow but I couldn't find a fabfile that worked out of the box with my setup so I found myself having to learn the specifics of all the deployment steps - initially for the purpose of creating my own Fabric setup. Once I got through to the other side I realized that my process really isn't that complicated to begin with, and now I really appreciate knowing exactly how my website works. Just for the record I run a single blog using Django, nginx, uwsgi and supervisord on Webfaction. I use git and virtualenvwrapper to run development on local computers and staging and production environments on webfaction. Once I get into using the same setup for many sites, I believe I will appreciate solutions like fabric or chef, but for right now I can't stress enough the value of writing your own conf files, syncing and migrating your model changes, learning to use git, and stopping and restarting processes manually. TL;DR While Fabric is a great tool to help you simplify your process, I wouldn't recommend it to beginners of Django. Instead make a few passes at going through deployment manually and establish a process so you can write your own fabric configurations later on.