AEgirMaintain your Drupal sites

The name: AEgir

“In Norse mythology, AEgir was the god of the oceans and if Drupal is a drop of water, AEgir is the deity of large bodies of water.”

groups.drupal.org

AEgir History

Originally a module called Hostmaster

First gained popularity at DrupalCon Paris (Sept 2009)

http://groups.drupal.org/aegir

#AEgir on IRC

What AEgir does for youAEgir gives users a point and click interface to

Create sites quickly

Run cron for all sites it manages

Backup and restore

Easily upgrade/migration sites (including 5 -> 6)

Clone a site

All in the same place!

What AEgir is made ofNote: AEgir is neither a module nor a distribution

Group of modules

Hostmaster

Provision

Drush

A custom theme named Eldir

Run on a specific server setup

Drush: (Very) Quick Tour

Stands for DRUpal SHell

A command line shell interface to Drupal

Allows an administrator to execute commands against a Drupal site without opening a browser

Multi-Site Drupal

“Multi-site allows you to share a single Drupal installation (including core code, contributed modules, and themes) among several sites.” - d.o

Each site gets a directory in the sites/ directory

Each site has its own database, therefore its own content/users/settings/etc.

Only upgrade the code once

Multi-Site Drupal

DrupalDrupal

allall SiteA.coSiteA.comm

SiteB.coSiteB.comm/SITES/

/

Modules/Modules/ Modules/Modules/ Modules/Modules/

Themes/Themes/ Themes/Themes/ Themes/Themes/

AEgir term: Platform

Each instance of a Drupal core is a platform

AEgir manages multiple platforms

Sites can be quickly moved between platforms

AEgirAEgir

PlatformPlatform(Drupal 6.16)(Drupal 6.16)

PlatformPlatform(Drupal 6.17)(Drupal 6.17)

PlatformPlatform(Pressflow (Pressflow

6.17)6.17)

Site Site AA

Site Site BB

Site Site CC

Site Site DD

Site Site BB

AEgir term: Task Queue

Every action within AEgir is called a “task”

Each task is added to the queue

Tasks are run from the queue via a cron job

The cron job is scheduled to run during installation

Tour of AEgir

Creating a new siteonly use lowercase urlsonly use lowercase urls

Upgrading/Migrating a site

Once with a failure

Once without a failure

Once with a failure

Once without a failure

Batch platform migration

An entire platform can be migrated at once

AEgir creates a migrate task for each site

Backup and Restore demo

Site cloning

A new site is created with its own url

AEgir handles most link problems

Adjusts the files table

Changes the body and teaser nodes with links

How AEgir works

A system account is created for AEgir to run drush command via cron job

This looks at the task queue and performs tasks

Apache is configured to include configs within the AEgir directory

AEgir user account has privilege to reload Apache

A privileged database account is stored and used to create databases and site accounts

Real world problems

Installing is hard (but easier now with install script)

Adds large complexity

File permission issues

Libraries installed in sites/all/libraries

No module handling

A lot of stuff can go wrong!

Advanced usage

Use drush make to create a new platform (build) for each site (application)

Support for multiple servers

Sever to server site migration and cloning

Client roles allow users to administer their own sites

Dave Hall (http://davehall.com.au/) has ~2100 sites running one AEgir instance

Future development

Support for DNS

AEgir Ubercart Intergration (uc_hosting)

Support for other CMS

but not Wordpress

Questions?