Aegir Overview

What is Aegir?

Aegir is a distributed instance management system, that allows authorized users to administer multiple Drupal sites across one or more servers, through a Drupal based administration front end. It is designed to help solve many of the common problems that administrators come across when providing mass hosting solutions, by providing the basis for turn-key deployment and management of Drupal sites and related services.

What do I need to run Aegir?

• A system capable of running Drupal: If you are reading this via the inline help, this would be kind of obvious. This system is entirely Drupal based, and has the same base requirements that Drupal does.
• A unix based operating system: The majority of functionality in this system occurs in the back-end, through command line scripting. There are also several features (such as symlinks), that are not available to users on Windows. There are no plans currently to add windows support.
• Your own server: The level of access required to be able to configure this system is very far beyond what is commonly available to users with shared hosting.

What are the components of Aegir

There are three main components of the system.

• Provision provides the back end used for system level tasks such as creating configuration files and managing databases and backup files.
• Hosting provides the front end for creating and maintaining Drupal sites. Each of your sites will be mapped to the node types provided by this module. It also handles the queueing of tasks sent to the back end, and configuration
  of your hosting system.
• Hostmaster ties together the functionality of the hosting front end and provisioning back end into a complete package. It handles initialization and auto-detection of your initial configuration settings, and directs you to the friendly installation wizard. To start using the Aegir system, you will install a new site using the hostmaster profile, which you will then use to manage all of the sites you host.

Where can I get Aegir?

Aegir is developed and distributed on the Drupal contributions CVS repository.

You can get the complete system by getting the three components from Drupal.org's downloads section along with the requirements, and placing them all in the profiles/hostmaster/modules directory, or you can download the single tarball version on each of the release announcements. You can find more detailed install instructions at http://groups.drupal.org/node/4701/install

The back end and front end require the drush module, and the back end also requires the cvs_deploy module, to correctly interpret the versions of modules installed. These should also be places in the profiles/hostmaster/modules directory.

This map illustrates where the files should be stored :

Aegir project roadmap

The roadmap is discussed more in depth at the Aegir Roadmap wiki page.

History of the Aegir project

Aegir is a completely new iteration of the original Hostmaster written by Adrian Rossouw for Bryght (now Raincity Studios). The original version has been running the hosted service provided at http://bryght.com for nearly 4 years, hosting literally thousands of sites, and has been implemented for several large clients.

Originally the system would only manage a single Drupal instance, on a single web server with a single database server, and as the requirements grew (concurrently running multiple versions of Drupal and then needing to manage several servers), it grew considerably in (unplanned) complexity.

There were also non-ideal implementation and licensing issues, such as the choice of Python and PostgreSQL for the backend and not developing the system as a pure GPL project, which severely limited the number of developers that were attracted to the project.

Because of the system requirements, it was also very difficult for new users to install, and had many unnecessary points of failure.

This new system has been designed with all these issues in mind, and the lessons learned have formed the basis of many of the Aegir Project Goals.

What are the goals of the Aegir project

The goals have been exhaustively documented on the Project Goals wiki entry

How is the system put together? What does it do?

This information is available on the Design and Terminology wiki entry