Andreas Rydberg

This week is my fourth week on the new job as a webmaster. I actually haven't heard that title since late -90 or maybe early -00. However, my job is to operate, maintain and develop our Drupal sites.

One of my tasks is to plan and setup our new server structure and through that I discovered the Aegir project. Well, it's a kind of a re-discover because I came on contact with it about 2-3 years ago, if my memory serves me, when I worked for my former employer. Back then I thought Aegir was not worth digging into, but now as it reaches version 1.0 (release candidate 2 at the time of writing) it has grown into something really good.

Aegir has some really neat features like creating a Drupal site as easy as creating a node, cloning whole sites and migrating between servers. When creating a Site node Aegir creates a database and handles and sets up the directories under the [drupal-root/]sites/ for you. It takes a minute to process and it's a breeze compared to creating everything by hand.

One last feature which was the most important thing that made me consider Aegir is the ability to update Drupal core, modules and run update.php via the Aegir interface, thanks to the the drush project, which is a one of the components of Aegir. (Drush, or "Drupal shell", can be used on it's own in a shell)

Aegir itself is actually a Drupal site, with a few special modules and components like drush, provision and the Eldir theme.

Aegir is made to run on UNIX-like systems like Linux, and can apparently be run on MacOS X, but not on Windows. And you need to have you own server, a virtual server or VPS can be used.

I have just started digging into Aegir, but it can be used to manage you own Drupal hosting service. Judging from the sponsors and contributers to the projects it is meant to be a base for developing such a service. At the time of writing Aegir sports a experimental DNS managing functionality, which is very interesting.