Aegir is the one-and-only FLOSS hosting system for Drupal sites that’s been around for over 10 years, a rock in the community. While Drupal hosting companies have come and gone, Aegir’s always been there for folks who want to host Drupal sites themselves. According to recent data at the time of this writing, there are 567 instances (that we know about).
It’s used by organizations worldwide such as the US National Democratic Institute, NASA, and the European Commission.
While Aegir 3 is the currently stable recommended major release, we’ve started working on Aegir 5, which is a complete rewrite. It has notable differences such as:
- Drush, traditionally used as the provisioner, has been replaced by Ansible, which allows for the hosting of any type of site or service, not just Drupal.
- The front-end, formerly Drupal 7, has been replaced by Drupal 8, which allows us to take advantage of all of the newer features it provides.
- Components are now best-of-breed open-source tools such as Celery, for the task queue. When Aegir was originally written, tools such as Ansible and Celery didn’t exist so all of the functionality was written as Aegir-specific code. We can now get off that island.
- The entire project is now maintained in a single code repository, unlike the traditional four (Hosting, Provision, Hostmaster and Eldir) that have been maintained historically.
- An out-of-the-box framework for automatic site updates via the Distributions concept. This was experimental in Aegir 3.
While still maintaining Aegir 3, we’d like to direct any new development initiatives towards the more modern Aegir 5.
The initial focus is on supporting Drupal. We then intend to add support for Matomo, Hugo, and other applications we use. However, documentation has been started on how to add support for anything else so merge requests or funding for new apps are greatly encouraged.
Along with the main documentation site, which includes the architecture, there is also an issues board for tracking tickets.
While we’re working on it as quickly as we can, we sometimes get delayed by other priorities. As such, we’re actively looking for sponsors to help us prioritize development. Please get in touch if you’re interested in partnering, collaborating, providing funding, or anything else.
The article Aegir 5 is coming, and not just for Drupal! first appeared on the Consensus Enterprises blog.
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