These are the installation instructions that are recommended on Debian. Aegir dependencies (Apache, MySQL, PHP...) are also automatically installed. If you are managing the installation from a remote Windows computer, well-known open source tools for this task are for example PuTTY (a SSH client for command line), and WinSCP (a SFTP client with easy text file editing).

If you wish to install Debian packages over an existing manual install, it's possible. See the Debian upgrade procedures.

Debian packages are uploaded to http://debian.aegirproject.org/ shortly after a release. We eventually want to upload those packages to the official archives, but this will take some adaptation and time to sponsor the packages in.

1. Requirements for automatic install on Debian

Basic Linux system administration skills

Root access to your server

An up-to-date system and applications

Run the following command lines to update your system and applications.

  aptitude update
 

  aptitude safe-upgrade
 

A configured Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN)

Such as aegir.example.com

The hostname returned by the commands hostname -f and uname -a must resolve to the IP address of your server.

After setting up your FQDN you must restart your server with a reboot command so your changes take effect.

Note that newly created domain name usually take 24 to 48 hours to fully start working. This period, called propagation, is the projected length of time it takes for root name servers and cache records across the entire web to be updated with your website's DNS information.

Other System Requirements

Find http://community.aegirproject.org/content/installing/system-requirements

2. Adding the project repositories

Use this command to add the Aegir package "Software Source" repository to your system:

To install a customized Debian package, see the developer instructions for the debian package. Other distributions are available for courageous people that want to try development versions.

2.x note: to install the development version of Aegir, you can use the unstable or stable distribution above.

3. Adding the archive key to your keyring

This repository self-signs packages uploaded to it (and packages uploaded are verified against a whitelist of trusted uploaders) using OpenPGP (GnuPG, to be more precise).

Use these commands to download and add the repository's PGP key, then update the package list on your system:

4. Adding backports for or manually installing Drush

If you are running Debian wheezy or later, or Ubuntu Natty 11.04 or later, you don't need to do anything here. The Drush package you need is available from your distribution's repositories.

If not, you should also configure backports repositories for Drush. Version 4.4 of Drush is now in Debian unstable, wheezy, squeeze-backports and Ubuntu Natty.

1.x note: if you are running Debian Squeeze 6.0 or Debian Squeeze 7.0, add the following line to /etc/apt/sources.list :

You might also have to add a proper Pin-Priority before this works. Create a file called drush containing the following and drop it into /etc/apt/preferences.d:

Alternatively, you could download and install the squeeze-backports package for Drush 4.5 directly from: http://packages.debian.org/squeeze-backports/all/drush/download. Then you could install it with:

dpkg -i drush_4.5-2~bpo60+1_all.deb

2.x note: if you are running Debian Squeeze 6.0, to get drush-5.8.x and above, download php-console-table manually and install it

You do not need to edit /etc/apt/sources.list or create /etc/apt/preferences.d/drush

Then run:

If you are running Debian lenny 5.0 or Ubuntu Maverick 10.10 or Karmic Koala or earlier, we recommend downloading and installing the Drush package manually. The version of Drush in the Ubuntu Universe repository for these versions of Ubuntu is outdated. If you are using Ubuntu Lucid LTS 10.04, you can install the Drush package manually or instead use Brian Mercer's PPA (Personal Package Archive) using the following command:

Now run apt-get update again to refresh the apt database.

N.B. Since Aegir 2 requires Drush 5, which in turn requires PHP 5.3+, Drupal 5 sites are not supported in Aegir 2.

5. DNS configuration

Aegir requires a properly configured "FQDN" (Fully Qualified Domain Name) be assigned to the machine. In practice, this means that the hostname returned by the hostname -f and uname -n shell commands should resolve to the IP address for this server, and vice versa, with the resolveip command (included with the mysql-server package).

For Ubuntu, /etc/hosts should have entries that look like:

To set this up in a virtual machine (e.g. Virtualbox), here are the steps:

1. Create a new VM
2. Go to settings->network. Enable Adapter 2, and set to "host-only"
3. Install Ubuntu. Set hostname as FQDN during install
4. You may need to add the lines `auto eth1` and `iface eth1 inet dhcp` to /etc/network/interfaces

If you have a virtual machine already setup and want to change the FDQN:

1. change /etc/hostname using: `sudo hostname NEW_NAME`
2. change /etc/hosts using: `sudo nano /etc/hosts` and change name
3. reboot and test `hostname -f`, `uname -n`, `resolveip NEW_NAME`, `resolveip IP`
4. YMMV - Your Mileage May Vary

6. Manual sudo configuration

If you are running Debian squeeze or later, or Ubuntu Lucid 11.04 or later, you don't need to do anything here. The Aegir package configures sudoers automatically.

If not, you will need to manually modify your /etc/sudoers file to add the following line:

The line above assumes that you have created a user aegir as specified in the installation instructions.

7. Manual installation of MySQL (on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS)

Please note that Ubuntu 12.04 LTS installs, by default, an insecure MySQL installation that contains an anonymous user grant, allowing anyone to login without a password. This breaks Aegir functionality.

If you are running Ubuntu 12.04, you should install MySQL manually, and then ensure it is installed securely:

When running 'sudo mysql_secure_installation', answer 'Y' to 'Remove anonymous users?'

Now you can proceed with installing Aegir below.

8. Installing Aegir

To install Aegir version 2, frontend and backend, use the following command:

2.x note: Aegir version 2 is now stable. Read more at http://community.aegirproject.org/2.1

1.x note: to install Aegir version 1, use sudo apt-get install aegir instead.

If apt-get reports that the aegir packages have unmet dependencies, then make sure that you have installed Drush (as explained above). On a debian system, you can force the install of Drush from the squeeze-backports repository:

Then install aegir using the apt-get command above.

This will prompt you for the required information (MySQL password, Postfix configuration...) and go ahead with the install.

During the Postfix configuration, the following options appear: "No configuration, Internet site, Internet with smarthost, Satellite system, Local only". That first text screen only allows to use the tab key to select "OK", and then the enter key to display a second screen where you can select one of the choices. The default is "Internet site", useful in most cases to enable the server to send email messages, for example to the admin.

At the end of the installation, you will receive an email message or, if the user "aegir" has been assigned with a local email account during the installation, the file /var/mail/aegir will contain the message. It will include a one-time login to your new Aegir control panel, that is a URL to copy into your browser so that you can set the password for the "admin" user.

9. Custom Drupal distributions and make files

If you have your own Drupal make file, you can go ahead with the above process, but change the make file to the one you want:

echo debconf aegir/makefile string /var/aegir/makefiles/aegir/aegir-custom.make | debconf-set-selections
apt-get install aegir

This allows you to specify the makefile path for your custom distribution of Aegir. To maintain these customizations, you'll need to ensure you do the same when upgrading.

An example aegir-custom.make file could look like:

Note that for this to work, you may need the patch from this issue, allowing drush_make to reference absolute system paths. If drush make --version <= 2.2 you need this patch.

After installing Aegir, you can reinstall the front end (hostmaster), with following commands:

su -s /bin/sh aegir -c "some command" runs some command in the /bin/sh shell as user aegir. sudo runs the su command as root - prompting for your user's password instead su asking for aegir's password.

10. Troubleshooting the install

To make the install smoother, the install command is run without much debugging information, which can make diagnostics pretty hard. For this, there's a special environment variable you can set that will trigger debugging output. Install aegir with this*:

You can build your own Debian packages from our repositories using those instructions.

Note: Prior to 1.1-4. the command was env DEBUG=yes apt-get install aegir