Introduction

Aegir installation seems difficult at first, but once you get around it, it's fairly simple. It's 3 basic steps::

1. Install the system requirements
2. Configure system requirements, which include:
   • configure the webserver, database, DNS, PHP, etc
   • create an Aegir user,
3. Install the backend (Drush & Provision) and the frontend (with hostmaster-install) with install.sh.

Note that these instructions setup a complete Aegir system. If you want to only setup a new remote web/db server, it should be sufficient to install the system requirements (step 1), configure them (step 2) and follow the Remote server how-to.

These instructions provide example commands for a Debian-like distribution, but should be fairly easy to adapt to other environments. In fact, this document is meant as a canonical reference that should work on every platform and that can be used for people porting Aegir to new platforms or installing on alien platform for which Aegir is not yet packaged.

What do I need to run Aegir?

A system capable of running Drupal

The Aegir system is entirely Drupal based, and has the same base requirements that Drupal does (with the exception that it won't run on Windows). See more notes on Unix and LAMP/LEMP requirements below.

Your own server

The low level of access required to be able to configure and run this system is very far beyond what is commonly available to users with shared hosting. A VPS from any popular provider such as Linode, Rackspace, Slicehost, Amazon EC, etc. will do fine.

LAMP / LEMP

LAMP / LEMP are used to run Aegir and provide the frontend interface, as well as provide those same tools to your managed sites. These components are further detailed in the following sections. While you can install Aegir alongside an existing LAMP installation, it is generally considered easier (and thus recommended) to start with a fresh server.

N.B.: If you do install Aegir alongside an existing server with LAMP/LEMP already configured, be aware that you will have to make configuration changes to Apache and MySQL where necessary, so that Aegir can work with your system.

A Unix-based operating system

Aegir must run on some flavour of UNIX, because the majority of functionality in this system occurs in the back-end, through command line scripting. There are also several features (such as symlinks), that are not available to users on Windows. There are no plans currently to add Windows support.

Web server

You will need at least one dedicated web server, running Apache. We generally work with Apache 2 but we should be compatible with the 1.x series. You will need root access to that server and the server must be reserved for Aegir. Sharing the server with other control panels such as Cpanel, Plesk or AlternC will very likely create problems and is not supported.

Aegir also supports Nginx web server, but requires at least version 0.7.27 or newer. Since Nginx doesn't provide php-cgi or php-fpm (recommended) modules, you will need to install and run php-fpm server separately. You can find useful examples and tips in the third party Barracuda installer available at http://gitorious.org/aegir/barracuda-octopus.

N.B.: This third party installer is not supported by the core Aegir developers, but you can find helpful community support at http://community.aegirproject.org.

Database server

You will require a database server, obviously. Aegir currently only supports MySQL and MariaDB. It is preferable to use a dedicated (not shared-hosting) server since Aegir will create database users and will require the use of the MySQL 'root' user.

PHP 5.2

PHP 5.2 and above is required to run Aegir because Aegir depends on Drush, which has this requirement. You also need to have the command-line version of PHP to run Drush properly and the MySQL extensions.

Note that Drupal's support for PHP 5.3 is still under development. Currently, using PHP 5.3 will cause (innocuous) warnings on every page load. As a result, we suggest using PHP 5.2 for the time-being.

See http://drupal.org/node/360605 (amongst other issues) for details.

Mail transfer agent

Aegir requires an MTA (Mail Transfer Agent) installed on your webserver in order to be able to install new sites to your new platform. If you don't have an MTA, the site installation will fail with message like "could not send email". Additional messages will show that site has been removed because of this problem. To remedy the situation simply install an MTA like sendmail, postfix, or exim and do the minimal configuration.

Other utilities: sudo, rsync, git and unzip

Aegir installs itself via a Drush Make makefile that downloads via git if you want the bleeding edge code, or via wget if you want the latest official release. If you want the latest development version, and don't have the git program you will need to install it on the server.

The jQueryUI library is used in the Aegir UI, unzip is required to extract it. Sudo is required to allow the aegir user the limited privilege to restart the webserver when required. Rsync is used to sync files to remote servers.

No conflicting Control Panels

Other popular control panels such as Plesk, cPanel etc, are designed to manage all aspects of Apache configuration and other areas that Aegir also is intended to be used for.

Running Aegir alongside such control panels is not supported and very likely may cause you problems or difficulties installing or running Aegir. This is not recommended. Filing bug reports that are caused by interference by another control panel may not get results. Proceed at your own risk / frustration!

System requirements of popular Drupal distributions

Some Drupal distributions, such as OpenAtrium, are specialised products that may contain unique prerequisites for optimal performance. Such examples may include raising the php-cli program's memory_limit to something higher than 64M.

Please note that this is not a requirement of Aegir but of the distribution you are trying to install a site on. Thus the Aegir documentation may not officially 'require' such performance settings, but be aware that Aegir may report errors if the system was under-resourced to complete such a task.