Aegir 0.4 Alpha15 released

The Aegir project is pleased to announce our 0.4 alpha 15 release. This release is primarily a bug fix release, which aims to tie off a huge amount of outstanding bugs and other tasks.

We did aim to release beta1 but decided that there were a few critical bugs still lingering that we wouldn't want to overshadow in such a momentous release. Instead we've chosen to push out one last alpha before (finally) heading out into beta and RC stages of the 0.4 cycle.

community.aegirproject.org

In our biggest news, which we've chosen to announce in this release, we are very proud and excited to announce the launch of our new community site, http://community.aegirproject.org !

Much preparation and planning has gone into building a clean, feature-rich community portal for our ever-growing Aegir users. We hope you'll agree that the documentation space, development information and community resources are long-awaited and desperately needed features to help users understand how Aegir works and how to use it.

The community portal features:

• News area (blog, announcements)
• Almost all the Aegir documentation has been re-written and dramatically improved in a new Aegir handbook, covering all aspects of installing, using, understanding and developing Aegir.
• Screencasts and videos from sessions and tutorials (all the historical ones have been collated and added)
• Events calendar
• Shop resources (to be completed)
• Feed syndication of the Aegir universe (twitter, articles, git commits)

The Documentation on groups.drupal.org is largely out of date and not in any sane order, and will be decommissioned in favour of the new documentation. Some of the still relevant and well-written documentation was dragged across and cleaned up where necessary.

The documentation area on the new site is still a wiki so we would like to encourage users to continue to keep them up to date and add more to help improve the experience for other users.

We'd like to thank all the contributors to the existing docs for their hard work and initiatives and hope you'll enjoy the new space and structure to keep helping make Aegir awesome.

Key changes in 0.4-alpha15

In our 0.4 alpha 15 release, these notable changes/improvements have occured:

• The DNS feature has been implemented and is available in /admin/hosting/features (Experimental)
• install.sh script has been changed considerably - most of the MySQL tests and user creation have been moved into provision to be handled by drush/php. There is no longer an 'aegir_root' user required for MySQL, we simply use your MySQL root user, which must have a password. You are required to supply a valid FQDN on installation, so that remote web servers can theoretically resolve the Aegir server if connecting to it for databases.
• upgrade.sh script added (see below, adventurous people please test)
• UPGRADE.txt updated to be a provide a little more clarity
• There's a new /admin/hosting/settings area with misc settings/customisations, including:
  • ability to run wget instead of drush cron
  • delete sites without having to disable them first
  • when selecting a core profile, hide platforms that incidentally have those core profiles but are intended as distributions (i.e OpenAtrium)
  • backup task saves site's settings.php with uncloaked creds. Useful for exporting to non-aegir servers or for importing into new aegir servers

Installing and upgrading:

The canonical source of installation documentation is as usual the excellent INSTALL.txt.

For the first time, we offer an upgrade.sh script in Provision, which tries to automate much of the steps outlined in the UPGRADE.txt.

It is still imperative that you read the UPGRADE.txt and follow all version-specific upgrade instructions located at the end of the document before trying to run the upgrade script. This especially applies to users upgrading from before 0.4-alpha8, including 0.3.

The upgrade.sh script attempts to backup the existing backend components, download new versions, and then run the hostmaster-migrate command. It assumes you are upgrading from the previous release (hostmaster-0.4-alpha14). If you are not, you may have to edit the script to change the OLD_DRUPAL_DIR variable.

The script is in its infancy and has not been tested except by the developers while writing it. We urge caution (take backups!) but encourage feedback. If in doubt, just follow the UPGRADE.txt steps and perform all the manual commands as you usually would.

Known Issues:

The following are known issues with the current release, for which there are tickets, but we didn't feel were critical enough to prevent another alpha release. Some of the issues have been present since prior to alpha14, they aren't all new issues.

• DNS - currently there is no access control
• Hostmaster install doesn't yet support remote db servers
• 'Save' button on forms under some versions of Firefox/Iceweasel on Linux is greyed out

Bugs fixed:

• #868896 : INSTALL.TXT needs updates
• #880712 : install.sh.txt not prompting for the root MySQL password on Fedora 13
• #882970 : settings.php should not be updated before a vhost file is created and verified
• #888210 : Undefined variable: missing_requirement install_6.inc:214
• #894004 : install.sh lies about mysql listen AKA move the mysql creds handling to hostmaster-install
• #896492 : Anonymous users can't view the 'hosting/disabled/$site' disabled page
• #897326 : Typo in provision.config.inc
• #898732 : Deleted sites are counted against quotas
• #911392 : Cloned site shows wrong database in UI
• #913486 : Database server service stores port '0' in the hosting_service table
• #914040 : Server crashed because hosting_site_alias table was huge
• #919848 : verifying a server queues platform verification before the server verification
• #922716 : Expand link opens new window when used from modal frame.
• #928570 : Modal Frame font is inconsistent
• #931136 : You can't delete the D7 alpha7 and beta1 sites.
• #934830 : no width limit of 320px for div#navigation ul.links
• #937490 : Fix Platform access control to deal with profile > platform paradigm
• #940816 : SSL Enabled Settings do not trigger insertion of Rewrite rules in vhost file unless domain aliases specified
• #942144 : Warnings when deleting a site
• #944450 : Saving a Package Node removes attached data
• #945894 : Enabling DNS service on server node gives MySQL errors
• #946422 : cannot sync platform to remote
• #947898 : Code in global.inc not picked up by settings.php
• #949044 : It is possible to create broken site or duplicate sites nodes because there is not enough strtolower(trim(domain)) used
• #950976 : Update hints for OS X
• #950980 : New OpenSSL breaks install script
• #951296 : @localhost no longer allowed in email addresses in Drupal 7
• #955184 : Backup task breaks any site by replacing settings.php with version working only with Apache
• #958094 : Disabling a site through Aegir front-end doesn't make it inaccessible
• #960106 : That the 'Publish path' for a new platform should be absolute is not obvious (usability)

various others not reported in the queue

Feature requests fixed:

• #366420 : DNS slave server support
• #366814 : manage DNS records properly when creating/restoring/verifying/disabling/deleting sites
• #826840 : Save settings.php with uncloaked credentials on backup (for using on non-aegir hosts)
• #896914 : Migrate form displays current platform as a target
• #897982 : Limit choice of install profiles to those on available platforms
• #903884 : Delete task should be visible and inactive, not hidden.
• #922278 : configure the master server to allow slaves to do zone transfers
• #955550 : Improve Documentation to Reduce IRC Support Requests

various others not reported in the queue.

This was a mammoth and long-awaited release. Thanks to all our users for their continuing support, patience and contributions!

-- The Aegir core devs