I've got Aegir (6.0-0.3-rc3) up and running on a localhost ubuntu 9.04 install, mostly using the excellent screencast.

However when I add an instance (site) for a new platform i added (verified), I get an error the welcome email can't be send. After that everything seems to be undone (see screenshot).

Is this because sending the email is required? (and if that fails everything is rolled back?)

The screencast/documentation isn't too clear on that one, saying it is required for drupal-6 but "you can skip it if you want"... so I'm a bit confused.

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Screenshot.png72.31 KBaskibinski
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Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) CreditAttribution: Anonymous commented

Can I ask, is the installer using a different locale than English? Or this is just a standard Drupal install using the defaults. If it's trying to use a different locale, it might be victim to the typo bug that I found here: http://drupal.org/node/550264 (edit: maybe not)

It probably shouldn't roll everything back if it can't send the e-mail. Nonetheless perhaps check why it can't send mail in the first place (are you missing some requirements in php, sendmail etc)

askibinski’s picture

askibinski CreditAttribution: askibinski commented

It's all default, English.
And I deliberately excluded sendmail during server setup, I'm just wondering whether this is required for adding a site.

adrian’s picture

adrian CreditAttribution: adrian commented

Yeah. unfortunately email, or exim or some such thing is required.

Drupal 6 itself causes the exit if the email isn't found, so we can't control that without modifying core.

hutch’s picture

hutch CreditAttribution: hutch commented

exim can be set up to use a "smarthost" or in other words to forward mail to another server
On Debian boxes the command is
dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config

I note that the only occurence of "drupal_mail is in the hosting_client module, I submitted a patch a while back, #503300: hosting_client module mail which I have just successfully applied (offset 12 lines) to the current version in CVS of hosting_client.module

Wether this patch does what the maintainer intends I'm not sure, but it did send mail in the test I ran and it provides the missing hook_mail function without which drupal_mail in D6 will not play.

HTH

Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) CreditAttribution: Anonymous commented

I wonder though if we have a checkbox system setting in Aegir 'send welcome mails when provisioning sites', and put a wrapper around the install_send_welcome_mail if this option is set or not. I already see:

  if ($client_email) {
    install_send_welcome_mail($url, $profile, $install_locale, $client_email);
  }

and the whole install_send_welcome_mail function itself is within an if ($client_email) { statement as well..

We already have a 'Send welcome mail to new clients' option in the Client feature, maybe we need a more general one for the 'default' client.

On the other hand, if Drupal depends on mail mechanisms existing, maybe it isn't worth tampering with it :) a problem for 'upstream'? :)

anarcat’s picture

anarcat CreditAttribution: anarcat commented
Status: Active » Closed (works as designed)

Email sending is /required/ right now. It may be a nice feature to have something in the frontend that would allow the admin those emails to be sent out, but it would first need to have a 'first login' button that would allow the user to login through the url that that email would send out. It would make a nice password reset mechanism too.

So good idea, open a feature request for it (two actually, and there may already be one), otherwise i think this particular support request is closed.