How to create new installation profiles in aegir system

Posted by tusharkanta on January 20, 2010 at 11:33am

We have installed aegir and in out of the box installation we have only one profile called "default". We need to create 3 separate installation profiles for 3 different types of sites. Is there any specific documentation or tips about how to create more profiles in aegir system ? Thanks in advance.

Comments

Hi, As far as I know, no

Posted by mig5 on January 20, 2010 at 12:12pm

Hi,

As far as I know, no really decent Install Profile documentation exists that is up to date.. yet!

Writing Install Profiles does require some competence in PHP and a little understanding of Drupal.. being so undocumented and under-publicized has made developing install profiles, in my opinion, somewhat harder than writing a standard Drupal module!

Here are some Install Profile utilities. Really I recommend doing two things (they are the two things I did):

1) Study the Install Profile API to see how you can call install profile hooks like you would a module
2) Study other install profiles to see how they're written

There is this guide but it is out of date and somewhat Drupal 5-centric.

When you write your profile and put the profile in the /profiles/ directory of your relevant Platform in Aegir, simply run a 'Verify' task on the Platform in the Aegir frontend. This will cause Aegir to 'discover' the new profile and add it to its package repository. In turn, this will allow you to choose this new profile from the list in the form when adding a new site.

Alternatively if you have not created a 'Platform' of your codebase in Aegir yet, and you have put your profile in place already, then the profile will be automatically discovered when you add the 'Platform' in Aegir for the first time.

Good luck!

also

Posted by adrian on January 20, 2010 at 2:30pm

use the features module as much as you can and just use the install profile to turn your features on by default.

Thanks

Posted by tusharkanta on January 27, 2010 at 8:10pm

Thanks adrian. I want to know more about this. If i use features module, is there any need for creating different install profiles for different flavors of the same site? It would be great if you explain bit more.

Just add a profile in your

Posted by DenRaf on January 27, 2010 at 7:24am

Just add a profile in your profile directory of your aegir installation and re-verify the aegir site. Your new profile will be available for selection when creating a new site.

Thanks all

Posted by tusharkanta on January 27, 2010 at 8:07pm

Thanks for all the suggestions. I generated the profile from the original site http://peppervillage.com
Site is huge and rich in terms of functionality. It has around 30+ million nodes and 226 modules enabled. The profile file is huge. I tried installing a test profile and verified the platform. It successfully verified. But if i create a site using that profile, site install cron always stays in processing mode because of the sheer volume of profile related tasks i guess.

My intention is to create 3 different flavors of http://peppervillage.com. Is there any way, i can do this with a smaller installation profile file to start with. Please advise.

30M nodes!

Posted by forestmars on March 3, 2010 at 5:17am

Presumably $task is still finite so default_profile_tasks() has to return at some point— where are you bottlenecking? And aAre you saying you can tune your site for 30 million nodes but your server/s still get hung on building a 200 module instance?

I'd be interested in knowing more about the features you've built with 200 mods, and any possible vectors for optimizing your task list; have you looked at how far into the task list it's getting?

It's not clear what you mean by the last part ("can do this with a smaller installation profile to start with") but starting with a smaller profile and working your way up would be the next place I'd look if $types array can't be streamlined.

Nice to see you're up to 30M, please tell me you have this running in the cloud.

-Forest Mars

Added a profile but it's not appearing

Posted by cleanthes on February 27, 2010 at 12:22pm

I've added an installation profile to /var/aegir/drupal/profiles//.profile and re-verified. The log from the verify shows that aegir found my installation profile, with no obvious errors mentioned
But when I go to Create Content>Site, the profile it isn't being offered. In fact the default is auto-selected when creating a new site, and just before it's auto-selected and hidden, I can see that it only has radios for 'default' and 'hostmaster'

Do I need to do something else to 'enable' this profile?

I knew that would happen...

Posted by cleanthes on February 27, 2010 at 12:30pm

Just re-read mig5's early response and realised that the profiles are platform-specific. I've created a new Platform and the profile is now working.

Is there any way to add an installation profile to an existing (e.g. the default) Platform?

It's easy

Posted by skwashd on February 27, 2010 at 12:45pm

Just add it to /path/to/platform/profiles/ and run the verify task for the platform

Yeah - easy when you're not an idiot

Posted by cleanthes on February 27, 2010 at 12:51pm

I was verifying the site not the platform, which is why it wasn't being picked up.

thanks!

What happens if an install

Posted by redben on March 27, 2010 at 1:13am

What happens if an install profile has additional steps ? i mean other forms and such ?

If you only want the

Posted by Rob C on November 3, 2012 at 2:44pm

If you only want the 'profile' itself, try the http://drupal.org/project/profiler_builder module. (no features, no nothing, it creates a clean profile from an existing site.)