Aegir: Your open-source hosting platform for Drupal sites

If you need an open-source solution for hosting and managing Drupal sites, there's only one option: the Aegir Hosting System. While it's possible to find a company that will host Drupal sites for you, Aegir helps you maintain control whether you want to use your own infrastructure or manage your own software-as-a-service (SaaS) product. Plus, you get all the benefits of open source.

Aegir turns ten (10) today. The first commit occurred on December 7^th, 2007. We've actually produced a timeline including all major historical events. While Aegir had a slow uptake (the usability wasn't great in the early days), it's now being used by all kinds of organizations, including NASA.

I got involved in the project a couple of years ago, when I needed a hosting solution for a project I was working on. I started by improving the documentation, working on contributed modules, and then eventually the core system. I've been using it ever since for all of my SaaS projects, and have been taking the lead on Drupal 8 e-commerce integration. I became a core maintainer of the project about a year and a half ago.

So what's new with the project? We've got several initiatives on the go. While Aegir 3 is stable and usable now (Download it!), we've started moving away from Drush, which traditionally handles the heavy lifting (see Provision: Drupal 8.4 support for details), and into a couple of different directions. We've got an Aegir 4 branch based on Symfony, which is also included in Drupal core. This is intended to be a medium-term solution until Aegir 5 (codenamed AegirNG), a complete rewrite for hosting any application, is ready. Neither of these initiatives are stable yet, but development is on-going. Feel free to peruse the AegirNG architecture document, which is publicly available.

Please watch this space for future articles on the subject. I plan on writing about the following Aegir-related topics:

• Managing your development workflow across Aegir environments
• Automatic HTTPS-enabled sites with Aegir
• Remote site management with Aegir Services
• Preventing clients from changing Aegir site configurations

Happy Birthday Aegir! It's been a great ten years.

This article, Aegir: Your open-source hosting platform for Drupal sites, appeared first on the Colan Schwartz Consulting Services blog.