Drupal 7 - Aegir and Installation Profiles

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gwmalbert's picture
Posted by gwmalbert on December 16, 2011 at 4:17pm

Greetings everyone,
Here at GW we are getting ready to launch our Drupal "factory" for quick deployment of cookie-cutter sites. We are using Drupal 7 and are developing an installation profile and intend to use Aegir for the deployment.

Is anyone out there doing something similar and if so do you have any recommendations, gotchas, tips, tricks?

Do any of you have any recommendations on Aegir support from US firms or individuals?

Thanks,
Mark Albert
University Web Services
George Washington University

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Aegir

Posted by themusician on December 19, 2011 at 4:24pm
themusician's picture

Hi Mark,

I am happy to hear that you will be using Aegir to manage your drupal hosting. Here at the University of Oregon, within the departments I work with, we have slowly been transitioning sites into the Aegir infrastructure. fThe biggest point to emphasize I believe is that Aegir is not yet a true deployment tool, rather it is a host management tool. What I mean by that is once you initially deploy your site onto a production server, there is currently no support for locking the production db tables so you can push changes back up to the live server.

For managing multiple sites across multiple servers, dev/stage/production etc..., Aegir has proven to be wonderful. One of our major pain points has been SSL with Aegir. Aegir out of the box supports SSL and does a fine job. However we implement some of our SSL in a more progressive manner and have found that when you start moving sites around with the clone/migrate tool it can be a bit of work. We are actively working with the Aegir community to iron out these idiosyncrasies as are others.

Another great trick is to build your platforms from within Aegir using make files. It sounds like you are headed that way. We have not yet created a standard install profile, but we do use make files to allow us to deploy upgraded core platforms with the click of a button.

We haven't hired outside support but Mig5 is one of the developers of Aegir and offers consulting. He would be who I would contact if external support was necessary. mig5.net

Good luck and welcome to Aegir.