We're proud to announce the second and final beta release of the Aegir hosting system for Drupal.
Ægir is a new set of contributed modules for Drupal that aims to solve the problem of managing a large number of Drupal sites. It does this by providing you with a simple Drupal based hosting front end for your entire network of sites. To deploy a new site you simply have to create a new Site node. To backup or upgrade sites, you simply manage your site nodes as you would any other node.
This release is feature complete with the main roadmap of Aegir. It will allow you to install, back up, restore, enable, disable and delete your hosted sites. It is considered mostly production ready, and should be safe to run on a production system.
This release will become the first RC in the next week, if no more bugs are found. The only changes that will be allowed into this release
are documentation and bug fixes.
We have fixed all known bugs since the last beta, and spent a considerable amount of time on the user interface, to provide a consistent
and easy to use interface for administrating your sites.
The biggest new feature in this release is the ability to provision Drupal 6 sites using the experimental multiple platform support (which can be enabled during the installation wizard). The result of this is a new installation profile called HostSlave. Drupal 6 platforms are completely supported for all the features of Drupal 5 platforms, including support for installation profiles and localized installs. Aegir will also import existing Drupal 6 sites.
Additional contributed modules provided in this release include hosting_alias, which allows you to maintain multiple domain names for sites,
and keeps the configuration files and symlinks in synch, and the hosting_signup module, which provides a simplified submission form for creating new clients and sites in one form submission. The signup form is services based, so it can also be installed on your main site
to allow clients to sign up for their own hosting plans.
There have been several improvements in the API since the last release, specifically to enable more powerful contributed modules to be
written, such as the ones above.
To install Aegir you need
- A unix based operating system.
Aegir will not work on windows.
- Full access to your own server or machine.
Shared hosting will not give you enough permissions to install new sites
-
A Drupal installation that is web accessible with it's own hostname.
It is not possible to install Aegir in a subdirectory. You may need to add entries to your /etc/hosts file to test Aegir, as it does not provision DNS yet.
Installing Aegir
Aegir's architecture provides the ability to manage multiple backends through a single front end. The front end installation also provides it's own back end, so the simplest installation involves only installing the HostMaster platform. If you need to run multiple concurrent
versions of Drupal, or separate Drupal installations for any other reason, each Drupal installation must be running the HostSlave backend.
Installing HostMaster
Hostmaster is the front end to the hosting system. It will allow you to administrate your hosted sites. You will need to install one
hostmaster platform to use Aegir.
- Download the complete package provided.
You may also choose to assemble the components as documented on overview wiki entry
- Place the hostmaster directory inside the profiles folder
All the required modules should be placed in the profiles/hostmaster/modules directory
- Install a new site using the HostMaster install profile in sites/default
You will be directed along the server configuration process, and importing your sites.
Installing HostSlave
HostSlave is an install profile that provides a headless instance of the provision back end system. The back end is available
for both Drupal 5 and Drupal 6, and there are no behavioral differences between them.
As multiple platform support is still experimental, Aegir does not yet automatically provision new platforms, so you will
need to manually configure an apache virtual host, and create a database for the HostSlave back end instance.
- Download the complete package for your version of Drupal : Drupal 5 - Drupal 6
You may also choose to assemble the components as documented on overview wiki entry
- Place the hostslave directory inside the profiles folder
All the required modules should be placed in the profiles/hostslave/modules directory
- Install a new site using the HostSlave install profile in sites/default
You will now have all the necessary installation done.
- Run the provision setup command
This generates the necessary symlinks and configuration files to allow for communication with the front end.
- Add a new platform node on your HostMaster install
This will finish the configuration and import existing sites automatically. You will need to enable experimental multiple platform support in admin/hosting to be able to add a new platform node.
If you have any problems, don't hesitate to contact us, by either making a support issue on the hosting project, or getting a hold of us on irc. We are trying to make the project as easy as possible to install, but we simply can't test every configuration possible. At the very least we would be able to provide more adequate documentation for such cases, so please let us know.