Aegir 0.1 Release Candidate 1 Released

We're proud to announce the first release candidate 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. This release will become the first stable in the next 2 weeks, if no more bugs are found. The only changes that will be allowed into this release are documentation and bug fixes.

Since the previous beta, 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 issues relating to retrying failed tasks, and added a missing permission relating to this.
3. The synch and verify tasks have been merged into a single task, which is also available on site nodes, in addition to platform nodes. This simplifies installation and repeated maintenance tasks.
4. The function of the import task has been changed, so instead of importing all the sites on a platform, a verify task will now create dummy site nodes for all the sites found on the platform, and an import task will be created for each of those sites. Previously the entire task failed if one of the sites on the platform couldn't be imported, but the new mechanism is granular and as such far easier to debug.
5. The provision module has been rebuilt to have all version dependent code in separate files, which allow much clearer maintenance of new releases, and severely reduces the amount of code that needs to be updated to release future versions (Drupal 7 and onwards). All code that use the Drupal API are now separate scripts, that run in their own namespace, which will avoid namespace conflicts in the future, and also greatly simplifies the database handling in that only one database connection is used by any one script.
6. The communication layer between remote scripts has been strengthened to avoid cases where unforeseen errors could result in the output of a provision command not to be parse-able by the calling script. This dramatically reduces the possibility that the system will just break, without any useful output, and greatly simplifies debugging of problems.
7. Strengthened security by implementing hook_node_access and allowing clients to manage only their own sites. Users can now also be assigned to clients, and inherit the permissions relating to those clients. The Administrator client has full access to all sites, regardless of client
8. Simplified the installation wizard, and now we also allow the user to enable 'Features' during the installation process.
9. There have been several improvements in the API since the last release, specifically to enable more powerful contributed modules to be written. Backend modules can now add settings to the configuration files that are generated, and will be loaded automatically when required by front end modules.

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.