We have already seen how to import sites in an Aegir install, but what if we want to test the "hostmaster" site itself, ie. setup a development or staging environment of an Aegir install itself?

This page explains how. The basic steps are:

1. Installing aegir

The first step should be fairly simple and intuitive if you got that far: you have to install aegir itself on the staging server. You should install the specific version that is currently in production.

Maybe that also involves uninstalling the existing install.

2. Backup the production site

Run a backup on the production site, on the production server. This can be done in the frontend or in the backend using:

3. Deploy the production site in staging

Copy the resulting backup to the staging server. Then you should be able to deploy it with the following command:

In this case, we use deploy to also rename the site (--old_uri=aegir.koumbit.net).

4. Tweaking the install for the staging server

The environment on the staging server could be very different from the production server. The server name will be different, maybe there will not be a dedicated mysql server, platforms will not exist, etc.

It is recommended to review the "Servers" page to change the domain names to the staging environment. In Koumbit's case, this means:

1. editing the master server to change the hostname and IPs
2. renaming the DB server to "localhost" and changing the database credentials

5. Troubleshooting

I had weird issues with failing to run updatedb on the hostmaster site (while deploying to another alias would work). My workaround was to suspend the process right before it would run drush updatedb, then run updatedb manually, twice: