Aegir 3.0

The Aegir team is very pleased to announce the official release of Aegir 3.0. This release ships with significant stability improvements, Drush 6 and 7 support, improved SSL, subdirectory multisite and nginx support and much, much more!

This release marks the deprecation of the 2.x branch. We will continue to provide security releases through the end of 2015. All Aegir users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to the 3.0 release. The upgrade has been thoroughly tested and has worked reliably for us.

Upgrading from Aegir 2.x moves Aegir from a Drupal 6 platform to a Drupal 7 one. The Debian package will migrate the front-end for you. While we have tested this with Aegir core, we strongly recommend disabling any contributed modules you may be running.

We have a very dynamic community of contrib developers, and various projects built atop Aegir. So if you were waiting for Aegir 3 to be stable, easy to install and production-ready, now is the time. The 3.x branch will be well supported as a lot of shops are running it in production already.

Major changes

The front-end has been ported to Drupal 7. We've also raised the minimum Drush version to 6.x, and the Debian package now installs Drush via Composer. Drush 7 is also supported.

We've added several "Golden contrib" modules to the distribution:

  • Hosting Remote Import
  • Hosting Site Backup Manager
  • Hosting Git
  • Hosting Tasks Extra

We're planning to add additional well-supported contrib modules over the course of the Aegir 3.x lifecycle. Along similar lines, we've removed hosting_platform_pathauto, as it's built-in now.

We've introduced initial Drupal 8 support, though this is still a work-in-progress. This mostly depends on Drupal 8 and Drush 8 stabilizing, before we'll be able to more fully manage Drupal 8 sites.

Aegir 3 now supports SNI for SSL.

A number of significant bug fixes and stability improvements have been incorporated. Among them, we've added locking in our task queue, and improved backup reliability significantly.

For more information, please see the slidedeck from the presentation by ergonlogic and helmo at the Aegir Summit: http://community.aegirproject.org/sites/community.aegirproject.org/files...

Major API changes

The API has not significantly changed, though there are a few additions. See the current API docs in the various repositories for additional details.

Installing and upgrading

The canonical source of installation documentation is

http://docs.aegirproject.org/en/3.x/install/

We're in the process of converting our docs, the old version is on http://community.aegirproject.org/installing We're tracking the conversion on https://www.drupal.org/node/2534734

In a similar fashion, the upgrade documentation is:

http://community.aegirproject.org/upgrading

Within those sections you'll find step-by-step instructions for performing both manual and automatic upgrade processes.

Note that you should upgrade to the latest 2.x release (currently: 2.4) before attempting the upgrade to 3.x..

It is still imperative that you read the upgrade path and version-specific information and follow all version-specific upgrade instructions before trying to run the upgrade script or manual upgrade.

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 information: http://community.aegirproject.org/help

Thanks to our awesome community for their help, support and encouragement as always! Enjoy the new release :)

Features and improvements

In addition to the "major changes" mentioned above, the following should also be noted.

Changes since 7.x-3.0-rc1:

  • #2494121: Stop servers in clusters from sync'ing back to master.
  • Make the upgrade script slightly more verbose
  • #2377819: Gzipping backups suppresses file permissions errors

Known issues

  • Drupal 8 support is (Chasing HEAD) not complete. You would need Drush 8 for that.
  • Drush master has an issue on Debian Wheezy (https://www.drupal.org/node/2491941)
  • When upgrading from 6.x-2.x enable the betterlogin module manually.
  • In Debian Jessie a systemd service file is missing, one is available in https://www.drupal.org/node/2347557 but it's not build into the package.