Aegir 0.1 released.

We're proud to announce the first 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. We were originally considering releasing an extra release candidate to make sure the first release was really rock solid, but since 0.2 (HEAD) progressed so quickly, we are now shortening the release cycle. We therefore want to shorten the release cycle to get more features out and favour greater adoption.

Since the previous release candidate, we have fixed all known critical issues, and spent time simplifying and re-factoring areas where problems
have occurred in the past, even if we had fixed the specific issues relating to those areas. We have made the system far more fault tolerant through this process.

1. We now depend on the latest version of Drush. During development we fixed an issue upstream in Drush, and as of RC1 we require Drush 6.x 1.2 or Drush 5.x 1.4
2. Fixed lots of permission issues. If you had problems seeing sites or clients, this should be fixed.
3. Fixed some import issues.
4. Fixed cron jobs, which were running on broken and non-installed sites.
5. Fixed inter-process communication (IPC) issues. A lot of cleanup and re-engineering of the way the hosting and provision module talk to each other went into the the tree after RC1, which fixed a some hangs and similar issues.
6. Fixed default MySQL permissions: we now create users with @% and @localhost to work better with distributions like Ubuntu which by default include an blocked anonymous user for @%.
7. Extra settings.php hook: it's now possible to extend what gets written to settings.php through external modules, with hook_extra_config().

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.

1. Download the complete package provided.

   You may also choose to assemble the components as documented on overview wiki entry. It is important to note you need the latest version of Drush.

2. Place the hostmaster directory inside the profiles folder

   All the required modules should be placed in the profiles/hostmaster/modules directory

3. 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.

1. 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. It is important to note that you need the latest version of Drush for your drupal release.

2. Place the hostslave directory inside the profiles folder

   All the required modules should be placed in the profiles/hostslave/modules directory

3. Install a new site using the HostSlave install profile in sites/default

   You will now have all the necessary installation done.

4. Run the provision setup command

   This generates the necessary symlinks and configuration files to allow for communication with the front end.

5. 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.