Aegir

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two thirds-way through a big refactor. todo; move things from here to other places.

Aegir is a Drupal distribution for managing Drupal site provision and hosting.

Overview

Aegir is a Drupal Distro that uses the Hostmaster front-end to control the Provision module with its Drush integration. Aegir uses Drupal multi-site features to share one Drupal codebase install as a Platform which multiple Sites can be hosted on.

If you want to create a site for a particular Distro, you install the Distro as a Platform then create a Site on that Platform. Sites and their content can be cloned on or migrated between Platforms or pushed to spoke servers. Module dependency is managed via those loaded in the Profile of the Distro with the .make.

Creating a Distro requires a Profile and Make files. 

#aegir on freenode

Deployment

See BOA - 'Barracuda, Octopus, Aegir' bash install script.

  • Aegir-up provides a collaborative, distributed development environment, that encourages the use of Drupal best-practices. It deploys the Aegir Hosting System in a local virtual environment for development and testing. It provides all the ease-of-use of Aegir, wrapped in the convenience of Vagrant-based virtual machines. Creating sites and platforms is a matter of a click or two, while rebuilding the entire environment is a matter of minutes.

Dev/production workflow

The Profiler library is installed with the .make and simplifies the Install Profile system by using a .info file to specify modules to be initialised, including site sections/etc. from the Features module, plus configuration settings via the Strongarm module. Provision initialises a site on that platform and installs the platform+site in Aegir.

Features and theme are stored using Git, --working-copy can be used to build a dev site then content can be migrated from live for testing. Dev platform is perfected, then rebuilt as live without --working-copy.

todo; use hosting_site_git and working-copy patch

Tasks

Creating

Platform

Use a build make file to call the main make (possibly on-top of a base profile).

Base .build file that Git pulls the base development distro .make and .profile (and .info for Profiler lib).

Behind the scenes pseudo; 

drush make --working-copy "$PROJECT_MAKE" "$PLATFORM_PATH"
drush provision-save @platform_PlatformName --root="$PLATFORM_PATH" --context_type=platform
drush @hostmaster hosting-import @platform_PlatformName

from aegir; 

/usr/local/bin/php /var/aegir/drush/drush.php --php='/usr/local/bin/php'  --context_type='platform' --master_url='http://aegirmaster.example.org/' --root='/var/aegir/platforms/exampleplatform' --server='@server_master' --web_server='@server_master' --makefile='https://raw.github.com/so/me/build.make' --make_working_copy='1' provision-save '@platform_ExamplePlatformDec02' --backend

Site

Things to remember for a site build in hostmaster;

  • Don't forget full domain name!
  • Create dev.* alias for BOA cache-busting

Behind the scenes; 

drush provision-save "@$SITE_DOMAIN" --uri="$SITE_DOMAIN" --context_type='site' --platform="@platform_PlatformName" --profile="$PROJECT_NAME"
drush "@$SITE_DOMAIN" provision-install
drush @hostmaster hosting-task @platform_"$PLATFORM_NAME" verify --force --verbose
drush user-login

Importing

Cloning

Aegir provides an easy method of making entire copies of a site. This includes the actual site files, modules and so on, as well as a copy of the actual database. This feature is called 'Clone' in Aegir, because it is a method of duplicating a site with a new URL or 'site name'.

The feature is very closely linked to the Migrate feature because it is almost the same, except that rather than move the site, it leaves the existing site in place and just copies it to a new name. For this reason, enabling the Clone feature also enables the Migrate feature.

Migrating and updating

In .info; 

“old_short_name = new_profile_name”

"Example: your site has been created with that old Commerce Dev platform when it was using ‘commercedev’ as a machine name for its installation profile, and you want to migrate it to newer Commerce 7.x Kickstart platform, but it is using ‘commerce_kickstart’ as a machine name for its installation profile. You only need to add one line in your commerce_kickstart.info file, with “old_short_name = commercedev” (without quotes), just below “name = Commerce Kickstart” line. Then re-verify the newer Commerce Kickstart platform in Aegir and Voilà! – now you can migrate your sites from the old Commerce Dev platform to the new Commerce Kickstart platform"

Aegir does not manage profiles..

the following is incomplete!!

Basic core and module upgrade;

  • Git commit theme and push to remote
  • Use profiler_builder to create new distro files (info/profile/make)
  • Edit files (todo/missing info)
  • Add new set of profile files to git repo


build a new platform with the upgrades, then migrate sites to the new platform. Clone and migrate to test before.

Be careful about creating additions or changes in sites/*/modules, sites/*/themes, etc. Migrate tasks will fail due to path issues.

"No, really, don't use sites/domain-name/modules for anything and save yourself headaches and frustration."

...

OK, so what is the correct workflow for sites upgrades in Aegir? It highly depends on how you manage your code, but some general rules are always valid and we will list them below:


  1. Create or choose new platform.
  2. Upload all your contrib modules and themes to the new target platform.
  3. Re-verify the target platform in Aegir.
  4. Clone your live site with some working subdomain in the old platform.
  5. Re-verify old platform and also just cloned site.
  6. Migrate cloned site to the new platform.
  7. Check if the cloned site works without any issues.
  8. If the step 7 above works, you can safely migrate also the live site.

Troubleshooting

If a site install task fails, and the build make/info/profile cannot be fixed and the Install and Verify run again to completion, there is no clean way to remove it.

Instead;

  • Delete failed site install task item
  • Delete failed site item
  • Remove failed site table from DB

Provision

Troubleshooting

/usr/bin/php /var/aegir/drush/drush.php @hostmaster hosting-dispatch
/usr/bin/php /var/aegir/drush/drush.php -y @hostmaster vset hosting_queue_tasks_frequency 1

/usr/bin/php /var/aegir/drush/drush.php @hostmaster hosting-task 1234 --verbose --debug

Run hostmaster tasks with debug 

/usr/bin/php /var/aegir/drush/drush.php @hostmaster hosting-cron --verbose --debug

Restore backup; 

drush @mysite.com provision-restore /var/aegir/backup/example.com...tgz

Older restore method(?) 

drush @hostmaster provision-deploy /var/aegir/backup/example.com...tgz

Pause task cron; 

drush @hostmaster hostmaster-pause

See also fimafeng, my older bash provision script for Aegir/Drush.

Remote

To sort with Drush#deployment

Proper master hub remote spoke Aegir requires remote Aegir user, Apache config changes and apache2ctl sudoers for restarting, so shared hosting environments are generally out of the question currently.

Saying that, one can manually create Drush site aliases with the relevant details to manually rsync and sql-sync.

Export

Aegir contrib

Access

Backups

Remote import

Migration between Aegirs

Remote Import goes on receiving server, SSH key from server site is coming from

Managing workflow

  • Hosting Features - provides a Task to Hostmaster that provides integration with a site's Features. It is currently in development but works for the most important task: Update & Commit Features

DevShop

Services

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