Aegir 0.1 BETA1 release.

We're proud to announce the first beta 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 constitutes the feature complete state of our first release. It will allow you to install, back up, restore, enable, disable and delete your hosted sites. It also provides a very complete installation wizard to help you configure your server, and excellent support for importing sites you may already have running.

Since the last alpha release we have added support for Drupal install profiles, which can also be localized. You can now provision Drupal sites in French, Chinese or whatever you want. Many bugs have also been fixed, and there have been several fixes to our (very complete) inline documentation.

Additionally the installation wizard now allows you to simplify the user interface by disabling experimental features, such as multiple platform, server and client support. These features will mature in future releases and lose the 'experimental' tag, but will still be optional
for users who don't need all the bells and whistles.

User interface and non critical ancillary features will still be added to Aegir before our final release of this version, and work on provisioning Drupal 6 sites will also be taking place.

To install Aegir need

• A unix based operating system.

  Aegir will not work on windows.

• Full access to your own server or machine.

  Shared hosting will not give you enough permissions to install new sites

• A Drupal installation that is web accessible with it's own hostname.

  It is not possible to install Aegir in a subdirectory. You may need to add entries to your /etc/hosts file to test Aegir, as it does not provision DNS yet.

Installing Aegir

1. Download the complete package provided.

   You may also choose to assemble the components as documented on overview wiki entry

2. Place the hostmaster directory inside the profiles folder

   All the required modules should be placed in the profiles/hostmaster/modules directory

3. Create a new site directory that is not called 'default'

   Because the default directory can map to any number of domain names, you need to install hostmaster in a directory with a domain name.

4. Install the new site using the Hostmaster install profile

   You will be directed along the server configuration process, and importing your sites.

If you have any problems, don't hesitate to contact us, by either making a support issue on the hosting project, or getting a hold of us on irc. We are trying to make the project as easy as possible to install, but we simply can't test every configuration possible. At the very least we would be able to provide more adequate documentation for such cases, so please let us know.