Installing Aegir
Because Aegir is a powerful system that requires some low-level management or configuration of your server, there are a few steps to complete the installation that go beyond what you'd normally be required to do to install a standard Drupal site.
For the same reason, Aegir doesn't support being run on a shared hosting environment where much of those low-level systems and tools are unavailable. Consult the System requirements to ensure you meet the necessary requirements for installing Aegir.
Warning: this section of the manual is being re-written to bring all the documentation from the source code (INSTALL.txt and so on) directly into this manual, so those documents may change and fluctuate over time. See this post for progress reports.
INSTALL.txt
A good way to install a specific Aegir release so that it may be versioned, as some installation steps may differ between releases.
The INSTALL.txt is modified for every release. For this reason, the easiest way to follow the release notes for that release. The front page of this site always contains a link to the latest release notes. Alternatively, you can find the release notes announced on our mailing-list.
The install process can be done in one of two ways: manually and automatically. The automatic install process is designed for people not too familiar with the commandline or system administration.
Note that you follow the automated install process is not yet fully complete and you still need to do some shell commands before completing the install. We eventually want to have packages for common platforms (.deb for Debian) to automate that process, or scripts that run as root for uncommon platforms for which packaging is impossible or too complicated (e.g. OSX).
The manual install section contains detailed instructions on how to install Aegir frontend for the first time. A welcome e-mail containing the same one-time login link is sent to the e-mail address of the main user account.
Method 2 - install the backend and invoke hostmaster-install
Experienced users are encouraged to download Drush and Provision manually on Debian-based systems, but also specific commands for other systems. It is aimed at system administrators and porters that want to control every step of the install process.