Sam
What is Aegir?
I've heard Aegir described in a number of different ways, but I think of it as simply a framework for helping manage the day to day system admin duties that Drupal sites require, in a standardised way.
Really useful tools usually evolve from an actual need and when managing a web applications, it doesn't take long for a system admin to build up a collection of scripts to help automate tasks, such as backing up databases, creating a snap shot of a site, syncing a live site to development for a new round of features or creating a temporary site to quickly test some research code. I imagine Aegir started in this way, but it's evolved to become a complete and flexible Drupal hosting system.
It offers a well crafted administrative front end, that allows running of the various tasks with the click of a mouse, no command line in sight! It's a 'Fire and Forget' type solution as you can stack up a series of needed tasks and Aegir will steadily process those tasks while you make a cup of tea. What's really neat is that if a task fails for some reason, Aegir will automatically roll back the site to the state it was in before the task was started.
Without getting too technical at this stage Aegir consists of the Hostmaster front end which is it's self a Drupal site and the Provision backend, which is a Drush module/extension.
Why use Aegir?
Aegir is capable of managing many Drupal sites and it's advantages really shine when upgrades are needed. The Drupal security team are excellent and quickly respond to reported issues. Once a patch is written they will make an update available and post details about the update on Drupal.org. Onus is then on us to upgrade our customers sites. This used to be a time consuming process; backing up the database, taking a snap shot of the code, applying the updates to the code, running the updates on the database, initial check of the site, then asking the client to check to ensure that we haven't missed anything, cleaning up version control. Okay all good... let's start on site number two... Anyone who knows Drupal knows that this can be a painful process.
Aegir does all of the above for you with a click of a button. Great! I am over simplifying a bit and will talk further about how Webscope manages this process in the next blog post.
So to sum up:
- Aegir standardises your processes
- Aegir recovers gracefully from errors
- Aegir saves you time
How to try Aegir
Aegir used to be a challenging manual installation process, but that has changed and a Debian package is now available, full installation instructions are in the Aegir handbook.
If you're a developer and want to try it out on your local machine, I'd recommend Aegir-up which builds a fully installed Aegir instance on a desktop Virtual Machine. A great way to experiment with Aegir but also a fantastic tool to use for local Drupal development.
If you manage a server with even only one Drupal site on it, I'd recommend using Aegir. So if you haven't played with it yet, fire up a VM, dive in and give it a go!