The Aegir Project has moved!
This Drupal group is no longer actively used.
To get involved and learn more about Aegir, you should go to our community site,
which also contains our official documentation section and the official discussion group.
Discussion
Bug submission guidelines
Somehow a bug or two may have slipped into Aegir. Reporting bugs is a great way to contribute to Aegir and help all of us shape Aegir into the Drupal management system we want and need. Mis-reporting bugs or duplicating reports, however, can be a distraction to the development team and waste precious resources. So, help out by following these guidelines for reporting bugs.
Before reporting a bug:
- Review these tips on configuring Aegir, drush, Apache and more.
- Search
groups.drupal.orgto see if your problem or question has already been addressed. - Look at the current issues for all of the Aegir-related queues to see if the bug has already been reported.
Aegir gets a fresh coat of paint! - New logo
The amazingly talented Young Hahn, from our corporate sponsors Development Seed worked his magic to provide Aegir with a new logo. Young has also written a post about the design process that lead to the new logo.
This new logo will provide Aegir with better branding opportunities, and is the first step towards legitimizing Aegir as the powerful product it is.
Unlike the previous logo, it is ideal for the purposes of print media, and will also allow us to design things like Aegir t-shirts, baseball caps etc.
Aegir as a product is finally starting to take shape, and it is going to be a very exciting time for us.
Read moreAegir gets a fresh coat of paint! - Introducing the Eldir theme
A few days ago I asked the amazingly talented Young Hahn, from our corporate sponsors Development Seed to take a look at the Aegir logo and see if he could make any improvements.
What I wasn't expecting was to log in on sunday night, and find that Young had not just designed an amazing new logo for us, but also created a very professional theme built specifically for Aegir. He successfully integrated the core goals of the project and built a very clean theme that leverages the functionality that Aegir provides in a clear, concise and visually appealing way.
So after picking a name, young contributed it to Drupal.org's CVS repository (where all aegir projects are hosted). The new theme is called Eldir, who was one of Aegir's helpers in norse mythology and his name also means 'Fire Stoker' in old norse.
Part of the philosophy of the Aegir project, is to have as few as possible requirements. And to that end, we have decided to make the Eldir theme an optional component, that Hostmaster will only use if it is available. Any packages we produce ourselves will also include this theme, but if you are assembling your own hostmaster profile, you can leave it out.
One of the reasons we are doing this , is because Aegir is designed to be 'white boxed' and work with any Drupal theme you throw at it, by not depending on Eldir we don't fall into the trap of just making theme level hacks for display problems, but will have to architect them properly.
This theme is going to be a god send us poor developers who are so very, very tired of Garland at this point.
Young has also written a post about the design process that lead to the new theme.
Read more
Fixed remote SQL server support, install/upgrade general feelings and manual migration between servers
While migrating our test platform to a production server and our usual MySQL cluster, we have stumbled upon some bugs with the remote MySQL support (which is technically not part of the release objectives, but so trivial and expected that I'm putting extra work on it). I have also fixed up a bit the INSTALL.txt and can confirm that HEAD still works fine and installs properly with Drush's HEAD too.
Read moreProgress Update: We've decided to fast track the 0.2 release
Me and antoine were discussing, and we're at a point where we REALLY have to look to find bugs in the alpha. We feel that the new features are more than adequate to make a proper release, so we've decided to basically go into a pseudo feature freeze.
We're going to look into adding http://drupal.org/node/371769 and possibly http://drupal.org/node/337485 still, but out main objective is to get a drush 2.x final release out as soon as humanly possible (it's the only real thing blocking release at the moment)
Read moretwo aegir presentations on thursday 28 april 2009
Just a note for anyone wanting to learn more about Aegir, there are 2 separate presentations going down at local drupal user groups tomorrow.
Brian Wood will be doing a presentation at the Berkeley Drupal User Group and Robin Puga will be doing another Aegir presentation at the Vancouver user group.
If you're in the area, and want more info, and speak to people who have been following the project for a while, do drop by.
Read moreAegir 0.2 screencast
Click on the image below to watch the screencast of the 0.2 release of Aegir.
Aegir 0.2 ALPHA 1 released.
We're proud to announce the first alpha of the 0.2 release of the Aegir hosting system for Drupal.
Ægir is a 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 the first alpha release of our 0.2 development cycle, which has been focused on complete support for running multiple concurrent Drupal releases, and managing upgrades of sites between Drupal releases. This release has also primarily been focussed on improving and simplifying the back end system, by incorporating a lot of our custom API's upstream into the Drush 2.x project.
Update: Check out this screencast for a quick walkthrough of the features available in this release.
Read moreDrush 2.0 Alpha 2 released
Just a quick note to let everyone know that we made a new release for Drush 2.x earlier tonight.
This was the only item blocking the release of our 0.2-alpha1 release for Aegir, so we will be able to make a release in the next few days.
Drupal 'ports' collection
What is it?
My recent work on Aegir has been very deeply oriented with Drupal package management and dependency checking.
From the perspective I have been working from (unix command line scripts), the currently existing functionality of the update module is simply not useful.
I am in need of an easily mirrorable meta-info repository of all the drupal projects, and all the drupal modules. I need to be able to figure out dependencies
Progress update: Package management and dependency checking
Progress towards our main development goals.
Drush stuff
Last week I completed what is basically a major rewrite of Drush, save the actual command files. Everything is a lot more sensible and normalized now. This also led to me massively refactoring Provision (our drush based back end) to make use of these new API's. I wrote up a small post about what's been happening with Drush for those that want more in depth information.
The major thing that is coming out of Drush becoming more like Provision every day, is that the drush_extras project is being re-integrated into Drush itself, using the provision conditional include API for the Drupal version specific code. Once that is done, we will be migrating Drupal install and update commands upstream to provision, which provide a much larger user base for the code, getting it far more testing. It will also significantly reduce the size of provision, and make it easier to maintain and will hopefully become the standard way that 'real' Drupal developers run update.php on their sites.
Because we are so deeply involved in Drush now, we are also tied to their release cycle. We are at a point where we want to release an alpha, but moshe has decided to re-integrate Drush_extras first, which should take about as long as it would to have gotten each version of drush_extras ready for an alpha too.
Enabled packages on a site
Aegir stuff
I haven't been resting on my laurels though, I've been tackling many of our critical issues (take a look at how good our issue queue is looking). I have been continuing in my crusade to make the Aegir project easier to build and maintain.
In the last week I finally nailed down the biggest issue that was holding us off on an alpha, namely the package management features. With drush 1.x we could rely on each platform being a site, to have access to the database, unfortunately with 0.2 that isn't possible anymore, so I wrote some routines that index entire Drupal platforms and find all the modules, themes etc for the whole platform, all the profiles and each of the sites, which I then import on the front end to build relationships between the package entities and the sites etc.
This now allows us to do some dependency checking, which we sorely needed. Previously it would let you attempt to migrate any site to any platform, no matter of the version.
This is much nicer. Imagine how great it will be once we have spaces, context and features properly playing along with all this stuff. You'll be able to roll out new features incredibly easily, and seeing that you can extract features with Drush, we can automate that too.
Package compatibility between platforms
As you can see, we're already very close to an alpha, so we're going to be working towards that along with the Drush guys. After the alpha there's going to be another phase of refactoring going on, as we'll have solved all our major issues for the release, and now it's time to make sure the codebase is up to scratch. We're also going to take some time and get some of the contrib modules playing nicely with 0.2, so that will take some time too.
I have also spent a few hours today on the community side of things, mostly fixing up the groups.drupal.org page. It looks way better now, and displays the release status proudly (keeps us honest, heh).
We'll be continuing forward in the next week or two on both the Aegir and Drush projects, and we'll probably have more announcements soon.
About Aegir
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.
In Norse mythology, Ægir was the god of the oceans and if Drupal is a drop of water, Ægir is the deity of large bodies of water.
Read more
Installation issues
I've been trying to get Aegir running and have had lots of problems. I just tried a fresh checkout/install of everything and got through the installation and configuration wizard steps error free this time, but am unable to provision a new site. It looks like the code and database are out of sync? Or is there a setup step I missed or something?
Read moreUPDATE: 0.2 Alpha release soon, even closer relationship to Drush.
We finally have HEAD to a stable enough state that we can work towards releasing an alpha release in the next week or so. This is pretty exciting news because it means that we're nearing the end of the 0.2 Development cycle.
Read moreRed Hat EL 5.3 Install notes
Below are some notes of my install process on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 System. I installed a 0.2 Head version including a (pre-bug) version of drush. (Mid March 2009) These notes were not verified (yet) and commands were reshuffled somewhat.
UPDATE: Instructions below will not work with Aegir 0.3 and higher. Drush provision now has more dependencies on the full php 5.2.x so just adding json to the native php 5.1.6 will no longer be sufficient.
Cheers,
Paul Krischer / "SqyD"
first@lastname.nl
What does my new position at Development Seed mean for Aegir?
By now, many of you are probably aware of the fact that I have joined the Development Seed team.
Before I go into the specifics, I would just like to thank Raincity Studios, for giving me the opportunity to start this project. Without their support, Aegir might never have gotten off the ground, and the experience I gained from developing and maintaining Hostmaster (Aegir's predecessor) has been invaluable in guiding the Aegir project to where it is today. I wish them all the best of luck, and I look forward to seeing them prosper from the foresight that guided them to support the project thus far.
Read more
Aegir Platforms
I saw the DrupalCon DC presentation and was very impressed by Aegir. We're currently evaluating systems that can help us deploy sites to our servers quickly and easily, and then keep them up to date.
I have got Aegir working on my system, and have installed a site using it, it was all relatively pain-free. My question is thus:
Is Aegir built to deploy sites onto identical platforms, i.e. without any site specific code? Or is there a way to add certain modules to specific sites but keeping them on the same core platform of modules?
Read moreHEAD breaking regularly during drush refactoring
A drush update broke our cherished and fragile provision module on HEAD, which depends so dearly on drush.
So do not update your drush checkout or at least revert this patch otherwise you will not be able to install new sites in your main platform.
If you have updated your drush checkout by mistake, you can revert back to the known working date using the following command:
cvs up -D 2009-03-11Provision will be synced with drush once it stabilizes.
Read moreBack from Drupalcon.
This is just a note to say that I've just returned from Drupalcon DC.
It was a pretty amazing conference, and one of my favorites so far (I still have a soft spot for Barcelona).
Like Szeged, the video team at DCDC were very on the ball, and had the videos up the same day as the presentation.
You can catch the Aegir presentation on archive.org.
