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Aegir, a Drupal super-distribution

Published on 16 October 2012
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Last year, we shared a post about Drupal distributions. Among the passionate debates within the community, we revisited the guidelines leading up to the upcoming release of Drupal 8.

Last year, we brought you a post on Drupal distributions. Among the heated debates within the community, we looked back at the guidelines leading up to the upcoming release of Drupal 8. As for distributions, it was difficult to pick a side between the advocates of the “small core” and those who support distributions of all kinds. Some time has passed. We believe that both options will coexist with Drupal 8, but we’ve noticed that distributions are taking up more and more space among the established solutions on the various projects we’ve encountered. Many agencies even have their own “personal” distribution to maximize deployment speed for their projects, when functional scopes are similar. However, there was still an area where we suffered from a lack of tools... Managing hosting architecture, which is time-consuming for Drupal specialists... That’s precisely the benefit of the Aegir distribution, now stable and well recognized.

Aegir, a "super" distribution

Aegir is a distribution that automates most common tasks related to deploying, maintaining, or backing up your Drupal sites. It's a "super distribution" in that it lets you administer all the distributions installed on your server. Want to deploy a DrupalCommerce, OpenAtrium, OpenEntreprise, Drupal7, or Drupal6 site? You can deploy in less than 5 minutes if you know your domains :) What’s more, the distribution allows you to manage your multi-site architectures more efficiently, or the administration of a high-traffic site in the case of multi-server hosting.

Aegir provides a simple and user-friendly graphical interface to make day-to-day Drupal site administration easier. There are 3 main features:

  • Deploying a Drupal site: Simply enter the domain, choose the available distribution, language, and CRON frequency... And there you go, your distribution is deployed!!
  • Maintaining your Drupal instance and modules: Aegir allows you to update your modules on an industrial scale, and on a "super" industrial scale if you use Drush commands.
  • Backing up your sites: Aegir lets you clone your sites in just one click. This feature is very useful for backing up your sites as well as migrating between servers.

The distribution is still being developed, but we’ve been testing it for several months. Not only is it full of promise, it also meets the needs of certain projects already underway in our pipeline. We were impressed and have adopted it.

Note: Aegir requires special permissions on your server to automate certain configurations. For example, when a new site is installed, the web server is configured automatically (vhost) and restarted. As a result, Aegir cannot be installed on a shared hosting environment. Please check the system requirements to make sure you meet the necessary conditions.

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