Community Documentation

Easy installation of a local development server using Drush and Aegir-up

Last updated April 12, 2013. Created by ergonlogic on April 3, 2012.
Edited by LeeHunter, cmaltais. Log in to edit this page.

Aegir-up is a Drush extension that deploys a local instance of the Aegir Hosting System atop Vagrant and Virtualbox, for development and testing purposes. It provides all the ease-of-use of Aegir, wrapped in the convenience of Vagrant-based virtual machines. Creating sites and platforms is a matter of a click or two, while rebuilding the entire environment is a matter of minutes.

Aegir-up provides a collaborative, distributed development environment, that encourages the use of Drupal development best-practices. Workspaces can easily be cloned and shared via Git, or even bundled into blueprints that others can use as templates for their own development environments.

One of Aegir-up's more powerful features is that Aegir's entire home directory is mounted locally via NFS. This includes the platforms directory, within which sites are installed. So you can edit any file on your site or platform directly instead of having to SSH into the VM, or move them via SFTP.


Quick start

  1. Install dependencies (Drush, Vagrant and VirtualBox)
  2. Install Aegir-up: drush dl aegir-up
  3. Initialize a new workspace: drush aegir-up-initialize project1 -y
  4. Enter your sudo password to add an entry to /etc/hosts, and mount an NFS share
  5. Wait while the Vagrant base box is downloaded (this will take a few minutes, but is only required once)
  6. Wait a couple more minutes while your VM is provisioned
  7. Visit the one-time login link provided to access your new Aegir VM. (The link will appear as a red alert message in the output.)

For further information see the documentation.

For a better idea of where we're headed with Aegir-up, check out #1459218: Roadmap. Feel free to suggest features and improvements in that issue, or #1480390: META: Aegir-up commands.

About this page

Audience
Programmers, Site administrators
Level
Intermediate
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