I think I’ve got it! With all the things I changed, I think the only important difference was including a virtual environment path in the local settings file (VIRTUALENV HOME). But below is the full process in case anyone is struggling.

Pretend my username is bob.

1 I got a fresh Ubuntu 14 (NOT 16!) Digital Ocean Server.
2 Set up the server by hand with the following steps (instead of using “fab secure”. Probably doesn’t matter). Summarized from a Digital Ocean article (don’t remember where).

ssh root@[ip-address]
adduser bob
gpasswd -a bob sudo
su - bob
mkdir .ssh
chmod 700 .ssh
nano .ssh/authorized_keys
<insert public key from your own computer>
chmod 600 .ssh/authorized_keys
exit
nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config
<change "allow root access" from "yes" to "no">
service ssh restart
logout

I don’t think you’ll need back on the server any more.

3 I’m running OSX locally. Installed pip and virtualenv, made an environment, and got mezzanine and fabric (note, if you’re running anaconda python or something, the virtualenv might get confused about your directories).

virtualenv mezzanine_env
cd mezzanine_env
source bin/activate
pip install mezzanine fabric
mezzanine-project bobs_project
cd bobs_project

At this point (still in the project directory) I set up my git repository. Plenty of tutorials out there about that, I think.

4 Edit the /bobs_project/local_settings.py file. I didn’t edit any other files but this one! When I was done, it looked like this (note that I included the virtual environment path!)

FABRIC = {
    "DEPLOY_TOOL": "git",  # Deploy with "git", "hg", or "rsync"
    "SSH_USER": "bob",  # VPS SSH username
    "VIRTUALENV_HOME": "/home/bob", # Absolute remote path for virtualenvs
    "HOSTS": ["<ip-address>"],  # The IP address of your VPS
    "DOMAINS": ALLOWED_HOSTS,  # Edit domains in ALLOWED_HOSTS
    "REQUIREMENTS_PATH": "requirements.txt",  # Project's pip requirements
    "LOCALE": "en_US.UTF-8",  # Should end with ".UTF-8"
    "DB_PASS": "default",  # Live database password
    "GUNICORN_PORT": 8000, # Port gunicorn will listen on
    "ADMIN_PASS": "default",  # Live admin user password
    "SECRET_KEY": SECRET_KEY,
    "NEVERCACHE_KEY": NEVERCACHE_KEY,
}

5 And that’s it! Make sure to navigate back to the folder with your fabric.py file in it, then

fab all

and follow the prompts / provide passwords.

Hope this helped!

P.S. I think the mezzanine CMS login starts as username: admin, password: default.