I am happily using fabric for my Python projects for deployment. Now I am engaged in a larger PHP project and wondering if there is something like fabric for PHP?
If you're looking for a build tool (as opposed to deployment), you can use Phing (http://phing.info/), a PHP equivalent of Java's Ant.
Doesn't handle the tunnelling (running remote commands etc.) but does do a nice job of breaking up your deployment into tasks with chained dependancies, and being PHP can interact with your PHP libraries easilly. You might find that some simple cap or fabfiles for the actual deployment, and could then call a Phing script to handle the post-deployment configuration.
PHP alternative for Python's fabric