Setup A New Website In Aegir

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Creating a brand new website in Aegir is really really easy. This makes it so much more possible to quickly roll out a sandbox to test a module, a demo site for a client, or even a full team and project management portal with Open Atrium.

Here's how easy it is:

1. Create a New Website in Aegir

Under 'Create Content' select 'Site'. Enter the domain name for the new site ('example.com' rather than 'www.example.com').
Select the Platform you would like it to be installed on (this option doesn't appear if you haven't added other platforms as well as the one Aegir runs on).
Enter the client email address - the welcome email for the site administrator account will be sent here - so we always use an internal email.
If you have enabled the optional 'domain aliases' feature in Aegir, then enter the Aliases you want - we put the 'www.example.com' here.
Click 'Save'

2. Setup the DNS

Login to your DNS control panel at your domain registrar, or wherever your nameservers are, and setup the DNS for the domain name to point at your Aegir server.
It's worth including a wildcard record - ie an 'A' record for '*' to resolve to your aegir server - then you can easily setup new sites on subdomains without having to ever setup DNS again!

3. Er, That's It

No really - that's it. Done. No more. Move on....
Just go to your email inbox and follow the link in the welcome email to setup your admin account - and you're away.

4. Note the power of the Installation Profile

Even though there is much discussion of the need for improvements in the way drupal handles installation profiles, they already have a lot of power - especially when deployed with Aegir.
To see for yourself, set up Open Atrium as a platform under Aegir, then create a new website on it. Go to your domain and log in - and within a few minutes you have a fully featured project management portal to rival anything by 37 signals!
See the blog post and screencast here for a demonstration of this:
http://developmentseed.org/blog/2009/jul/09/rapidly-deploy-atrium-sites-...

Here are the installation profiles available on drupal.org: http://drupal.org/project/installation+profiles

So, what could you setup in your own installation profile so that you can deploy client sites ready-rolled with all your favourite contrib modules, themes and your own custom.module with all those tweaks and hacks you always have to do on each new site?

Here's how to write an installation profile: http://drupal.org/node/159730

Troubles?

  • "The external command could not be executed due to an application error.": This kind of error may hint you have a memory limit issue. Aegir uses drush through command line PHP. This means, amongst else, that the right php.ini for it, is not the same as used for apache. Try /etc/php5/cli/php.ini (on Ubuntu), and increase the default (32M) memory limit to something higher, then run the task again.

Above error might also be resolved by applying http://drupal.org/node/882970#comment-3382542

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