Aegir 0.2 beta 1 released.
We're proud to announce the first beta 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 beta 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 fixing bugs and polishing the final release of the 0.2 release.
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Progress 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 moreAegir 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 moreDrupal '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.
UPDATE: 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 moreProgress update - Frontend and Backend are now completely separate. Experimental multi-server support.
One of the major changes to Aegir for the 0.2 release, is integrating with Drush 2.x.
What this comes down to is that, like Drush, Provision has ceased being a 'module' in the traditional sense.
Each server that Aegir manages will now need to have one instance of Drush, and one instance of Provision.
This resulted in some refactoring in the Hosting module, as it was depending on Provision being available as a module for a number of things.
One of the other things that I added to the code in HEAD, once the refactoring had taken place, is the ability to call instances of Drush and Provision on remote servers. This means that you can now install, enable, disable, delete, backup, roll back , and upgrade Drupal sites on multiple servers, that are managed by Aegir.
Read moreAegir 0.1 released.
We're proud to announce the first release of the Aegir hosting system for Drupal.
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.
This release is feature complete with the main roadmap of Aegir. It will allow you to install, back up, restore, enable, disable and delete your hosted sites. We were originally considering releasing an extra release candidate to make sure the first release was really rock solid, but since 0.2 (HEAD) progressed so quickly, we are now shortening the release cycle. We therefore want to shorten the release cycle to get more features out and favour greater adoption.
Read moreProgress update - HEAD (0.2) can now handle Drupal 5-7, site cloning and migration of sites between platforms (aka: upgrades)
I pushed through with some of the changes I was making on monday, and implemented a mechanism for provision to conditionally include version specific code. What this means, is that 1 checkout of provision, will now have all the information it needs to manage any supported version of Drupal you throw at it.
Read moreAegir 0.2 and Drush 2.x ... sitting in a tree
As our 0.1 release is nearing, I have been making some steps toward our 0.2 release. The onus for this progress has been some really exciting changes happening upstream in the Drush project.
Our 0.1 release was originally only going to manage a Drupal platform, with no support for hosting sites on Drupal 6. As the project wore on, we realized we needed to become invested in Drupal 6 very quickly, so we ported only the back end to Drupal 6, and have been maintaining the releases in parallel.
Living in sin with Drush 1.x
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