The Aegir team is pleased to announce the second preview (alpha) release of the Aegir 2.x branch, after nearly 3 months of development since our first alpha release. We've squashed a number of tenacious bugs, added some nifty features, and made some important improvements to our API. We expect at least one more alpha release before we call a feature-freeze, and begin out stabilizing and cleanup (beta) release cycle.

During this release cycle, we also began work on Aegir 3, a more-or-less straight port of Aegir 2 to Drupal 7. We continue to sync changes in 2.x to our 3.x branch, and look forward to continuing the port (and beginning to add new features) as soon as we've released our first stable 2.x release.

Our next alpha release will target getting sub-site support (example.com/site1, example.com/site2, etc.) into Aegir core as an experimental feature. This has been our number one feature request from higher education institutions, and so we intend to incorporate it into Aegir 2, in order to enable greater adoption within that sector. We have a fairly detailed implementation plan, and so feel confident that we can incorporate this major feature, in fairly short order.

Release overview

This release features improvements to the IP management mechanisms that were broken in the last alpha1 release. We now manage IP addresses individually, and check if an IP is in use before allowing it to be deleted.

We also finally leave the files alone on spokes in the multi-server model, a long-standing bug in the 1.x series that led to data loss. A lot of work was done to standardize the Nginx configuration to allow for simpler, yet optional, configurations that leave the admin in charge of choosing the optimisation methods.

Also, we've moved Hosting and Eldir back to their own projects, and are now included via our makefiles. This simplifies building custom install profiles, though it complicates our release process somewhat. We've also added a drupal-org.make that will eventually allow proper distribution bundling of Aegir.

Finally, we've moved to using Views and View Bulk Operations for our lists of sites, platforms and packages. While there remain some rough edges, this will allow much easier customization of our principal UIs. It has also significantly reduced the custom code we have to maintain, in favour of exported Views, which simplifies maintenance.

Known issues

• the Debian package support for nginx is severely broken #2001142
• the views bulk operations version shipped with alpha2 has security issues, see #2001964
• the debian package shows a lot of garbage when installing from scratch, which is almost harmless except that we don't see the login URL, use drush @hostmaster uli to get a new one, fixed in #2002076
• an update hook was incorrectly named, and has since been fixed. This may cause the hook to be run again, if the site is upgraded to a newer version. The updates should not be destructive, but may output errors.
• Placement of a number of our new Views-based blocks was omitted from the install profile, and so won't appear on a fresh install. These can be manually placed on the blocks page.

API changes

• deprecate hosting_ip_delete_revision(), dupe of hosting_ip_delete() now that revisions are gone (8 weeks ago)
• allow running tasks that appear to be running with --force
• remove deprecated DEBUG flag in debian package
• #1785624: Some Drupal API changes in D7 (and D8) are not used/respected properly
• #1945950: Rename provision_drupal_sync_site_back()
• #1083366: Make the spokes authoritative for files/ and private/ directories
• #1812338: Refactor sync back
• a new control file has been introduced in /etc/nginx/basic_nginx.conf to force the nginx configuration to be the "simpler" one (see #1635596: nginx: do not decide the policy for users)
• #1987026: Move generated platform drushrc.php to sites/all/drush

New features

• #1929372: Flag tasks with logged warnings
• #1515416: On a package page, show table listing sites and platforms using the package
• #1853620: Add db_name to site summary
• #1681904: Ability to configure a url to redirect to in site configuration.
• #1968226: manage each IP individually on the server level - manage IPs individually
• add uninstall command
• Nginx Security: BEAST attack protection and fix for PCI compliance.
• #1980136: Allow setting default profile from the front-end.
• #588728: Replace custom lists with Views and VBO for sites, platforms and packages.

Bugfixes

• #1930670: Duplicate entry 0 for key PRIMARY in hosting_ip_addresses when installing / upgrading
• #1907028: user warning: Table 'XXX.hosting_ip_addresses' doesn't exist
• #1961920: nginx: [emerg] invalid number of arguments in "limit_conn_zone" directive in /etc/nginx/conf.d/aegir.conf
• #1923490: Incorrect error message in aegir-provision2.preinst
• #1901508: "gzip --rsyncable" is invalid on OS X
• #1678528: Database deleted on edge cases
• #1930740: provision-delete leaves a drushrc.php lying around
• Nginx: Do not override Nginx name with fake Apache name.
• #1990370: Enable Hosting feature dependencies.

Other

• #1923552: Rename 'Queue runner settings' tab to 'Queue daemon'
• #1834036: Add 'hosting platform pathauto' to the .gitignore
• #1785624: Some Drupal API changes in D7 (and D8) are not used/respected properly
• #1979496: Update upgrade.sh.txt for Drush 5
• #1974752: Document old_uri option for provision-deploy