0.4-rc1 release notes

The Aegir team is very pleased to announce the first release candidate of Aegir 0.4!

This is the first rc from which we will go into crazy bugfixing mode until we have no criticals and will then roll out the official 0.4.

Key changes in 0.4-rc1

There are a lot of bug fixes and features added into this release.

Significantly, a major data-loss bug was fixed in Multiserver environments, that was causing a remote site's 'files' directory contents to be deleted if those files didn't already exist on the 'master' copy of the site on the hostmaster system.

Also, we stopped hardcoding "$conf['cache'] = 1" in sites' settings.php, returning control over the caching function back to the user by way of:

  • inserting the preferred setting into a file called 'local.settings.php' alongside the settings.php so it won't be clobbered by the template, or
  • same as above but in /var/aegir/config/includes/global.inc to set it globally for all sites, or
  • setting it in /admin/settings/performance on your site, and having that setting stick instead of being reset by the hardcode.

Known Issues

  • DNS has no access control - anybody can create any zone (#922252)
  • The site form suffers from some performance issues when you have a lot of platforms (#955854)
  • Cluster servers are probably broken right now (#1016890)
  • Aliases are not persisted across Migrate, (Rename), Clone (provision-deploy) (#1004526)

See all the issues tagged as aegir-0.4 and issues marked as 'major' for our comprehensive list of outstanding issues.

Installing and upgrading

The canonical source of installation documentation is as usual the excellent INSTALL.txt. The hostmaster and provision tarballs have the following checksums:

  • provision-0.4-rc1.tgz: 6f4da4ba7dcfaa1bcc3c44f96beb3eda
  • hostmaster-0.4-rc1.tgz: b2a42b151b817c1ea6cdf15462aa2e15

For users who have Rackspace Cloud accounts and want to install Aegir in the cloud, you are welcome to try mig5's Frigg script, which automatically creates a new virtual server and installs Aegir, with one command!

For users of 0.4-beta2 and earlier, 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.

For users coming from 0.4-beta1 or beta2, there are unlikely to be any version-specific manual steps required to upgrade to 0.4-rc1, but you should make a habit of reading them anyway just to make sure. No-one likes a nasty surprise!

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-beta2). If you are not, you may have to edit the script to change the OLD_DRUPAL_DIR variable.

Bugs fixed

New features

No Drush 4 or Drush Make 2.0?

Some people might be wondering why we haven't changed the install.sh or upgrade.sh scripts to fetch the latest Drush 4.2 release or Drush Make 2.0.

Drush

Drush 4.2 has a bug which breaks rsync and possibly other stuff when using multiserver.

It's been fixed in Drush, but we are awaiting a 4.3 release before we roll with it. If you see 4.3 come out, you can probably upgrade your Drush if you wish (we tested this morning and are in fact compatible with Drush HEAD at time of writing).

See this ticket for more: http://drupal.org/node/1041386

Drush Make

Drush Make 2.0 has a bug that prevents building platforms from distributions that didn't come from drupal.org.

This has also been fixed in HEAD, but we are awaiting a 2.1 release before we roll with it. If you see 2.1 come out, you can probably upgrade your Drush Make if you wish.

See this ticket for more: http://drupal.org/node/1059238

We are working with the developers of these projects to attempt to 'sync' our releases in future, but we wanted to roll out rc1 to all you good folk sooner rather than later this time :)

Need help?

If you struggle to install or upgrade your Aegir system, you have a number of options available to you for getting help.

Consult this page for more: http://community.aegirproject.org/help

Thanks to our awesome community for their help, support and encouragement as always!