TL;DR:
Is there anyway to make Aegir and DA coexist happily?
After reading and meditating on it more I guess the big question is can Aegir provide an environment where different sites can share signon's and nodes?
So here's what i'm trying to do.
I'm planning out a site implementation and here are my base requirements:
- a main site www.foo.com
lots (hundreds) of subdomains with 85% individual content.
These are based on cities
cincinnati.foo.com
atlanta.foo.com
the shared data would be for example on the cincinnati.foo.com site i might want to pull in some nodes from nearby cities such as dayton.foo.com or columbus.foo.com
These will be created and tweaked on an individual basis but from the same theme/template.
This functionality I think is a prime candidate for Domain Access and wouldn't even have a need for Aegir (I believe, please correct me if i'm wrong)
I want users to be able to have a single sign in across the main domain and all subdomains (again provided easily with DA)
HOWEVER
requirement 2.
2.Running organic groups (with domain access advanced to allow everything to work together) to allow for (obviously) groups.
A 'hosting' product will be available in an ubercart store that will create a new domain in DA that has a separate standard template then the above sites (basically we are serving one industry and their sites will be largely the same, about us, history, current events etc....) and admin members of the OG will be able to edit and create the content and theme of this particular domain.
It needs access to <1% of the nodes in some of the sites above (basically we will allow them to add specific views listing the events the members of their OG have created on *.foo.com to their new domain)
Everything but that last bit sounds like it'd be a lot easier to do with a drush script and Aegir rather than a bunch of complex rules and DA... however I've read Aegir doesn't play well with DA.
I've read about passing nodes from one domain to another via RSS, is this something easy? Or am I making this way to complicated and Aegir really is a quick and dirty solution?
After reading and meditating on it more I guess the big question is can Aegir provide an environment where different sites can share signon's and nodes?
Thanks for reading and I appreciate any and all comments.
Comments
RE: Aegir and Subdomains/Domain Access
Aegir considers each site unique and standalone, it does not support shared tables as used by DA. The developers have stated in the past that they won't support DA or other shared table modules. Aegir migrates sites between platforms to perform upgrades, if you have 2 sites with shared tables one can be migrated while the other is still on the old platform, which causes too many issues.
Given that both aegir and subdomain have their own custom apache configuration, they are unlikely to place nicely together out of the box. Without looking at subdomain's requirements in detail, I'd suspect that you'd need to write some custom code for aegir to make it work, if that is at all possible.
You might want to consider the Feeds module for sharing content between sites and having each site completely separate. As for the common legal content, you might want to consider running a central site for that stuff, or use some custom drush modules for pushing content into sites. I have some scripts for doing that.
Interesting. I seem to have
Interesting. I seem to have DA working with Aegir right now but I've not tried to migrate or upgrade the site. But with Domain Access, the "site" isn't really a site so Aegir isn't even aware of it and migrating the main site shouldn't affect the subsites at all, since they aren't really sites, right?
I'm curious how you would do the same with Feeds, though.
When your are using Domain
When your are using Domain Access, you only need to add domain aliases for the site in the Aegir and to use required code in global.inc, for example:
/*** Domain module
*
*/
if (file_exists('sites/all/modules/domain/settings.inc')) {
require_once "sites/all/modules/domain/settings.inc";
}
You can manage/migrate the site in Aegir like any other Drupal site, because DA works "on the fly" and doesn't require separate/shared databases or table prefixes etc.
Thanks for the clarification,
Thanks for the clarification, that's how I'm using it now.
Any performance hit?
I use domain access only on one site on a platform with 30+ sites, so does adding the domain module's config in global.inc have an performance effect on other sites?
configuring DA inside Aegir
I'm trying to get this solution working right now. Is there something peculiar about setting up the DNS or virtual hosting for the DA sites? Right now, I'm running Barracuda Aegir and have the DA subdomain set up as a CNAME pointing to the Aegir site, but all I'm able to get is the default "Welcome to Nginx" page.
By the way, Grace, thanks for your expeditious response to my question on the Barracuda install. It was much appreciated.
I just use an A record to
I just use an A record to point the subdomain at my IP address, then make the subdomain an alias of the main site with Aegir.
As butler360 said, you need
As butler360 said, you need to enable alias feature in Aegir and then simply add every (sub)domain, one per line, in the aliases form on site edit form in Aegir. It will re-verify the site and add all aliases to the Nginx configuration, so all of them will now point to your site and DA will take care about the rest.
A wildcard ServerAlias would
A wildcard ServerAlias would work for people wanting a DA site with dynamic subdomains -- does a *.alias work with Aegir's Site aliases?
use local.settings.php
Aegir now allows using local.settings.php in your platforms/test-platform/sites/example.com/ directory
See http://community.aegirproject.org/node/71
based on the structure of platforms/test-platform/sites/example.com/ directory i've added the following to local.settings.php:
<?phpinclude dirname(__FILE__)."/modules/domain/settings.inc";
?>
and it seems to work, even when i migrate site to another platform.