To celebrate the first release candidate of Aegir 0.2, I have put together the following exhaustively complete screencast guiding you through installing the Aegir hosting system. This screencast was made by downloading an Ubuntu server vmware image from ThoughtPolice, and documenting the entire process of installing a fully working instance of Aegir hosting. Because of the nature of the vmware image, this screencast literally starts from nothing and shows you everything that needed to be done to install aegir. Your mileage may vary, as your own VPS or server most likely already has things like openssh and sendmail installed. As this screencast is very text heavy, I have also included the complete transcript of all the commands used during the process. All the configuration files that are included in this post are meant as examples only, and should not just be dropped onto your server. The video documents exactly how they were changed, and you need to follow the changes, not the final result. Installing required packages

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# basic server maintenance
sudo apt-get update;
sudo apt-get upgrade;

# Specific to this environment
sudo apt-get install openssh-server;
sudo apt-get install sendmail;

# Required components
sudo apt-get install wget cvs;
sudo apt-get install mysql-server mysql-client;
sudo apt-get install apache2;
sudo apt-get install php5 php5-cli php5-mysql;

# Only needed if you are not using a real domain
sudo apt-get install bind9;
)

Configuring bind

sudo vim /etc/bind/named.conf.local &&
sudo vim /etc/bind/db.vmdev &&
sudo /etc/init.d/bind9 restart

sudo vim /etc/resolv.conf &&
sudo vim /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf &&
sudo dhclient

ping random.vmdev

Resulting files : named.conf.local db.vmdev dhclient.conf resolv.conf Creating Aegir user

sudo adduser aegir --home /var/aegir &&
su - aegir

Downloading Aegir

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export CVSROOT=:pserver:anonymous:anonymous@cvs.drupal.org:/cvs/drupal-contrib
cvs login

# Download Drush
cvs -z6 co -d drush -rDRUPAL-6--2-0-RC1 contributions/modules/drush

# Download provision
mkdir ~/.drush
cvs -z6 co -d .drush/provision -rDRUPAL-6--0-2-RC1 contributions/modules/provision

# Download hostmaster install profile
cvs -z6 co -d hostmaster -rDRUPAL-5--0-2-RC1 contributions/profiles/hostmaster
mkdir hostmaster/modules
mkdir hostmaster/themes

# Download hosting front end
cvs -z6 co -d hostmaster/modules/hosting -rDRUPAL-5--0-2-RC1 contributions/modules/hosting

# Download optional components eldir and admin_menu
cvs -z6 co -d hostmaster/themes/eldir -rDRUPAL-5--0-2-RC1 contributions/themes/eldir
~/drush/drush.php dl admin_menu-5.x-2.8 --destination=hostmaster/modules
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Configuring Apache - Creating virtual host

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mkdir -p ~/config/vhost.d
cp hostmaster/apache2.conf.txt ~/config/vhost.d/aegir.vmdev
vim ~/config/vhost.d/aegir.vmdev
)

Resulting files : aegir.vmdev Downloading Drupal

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drush/drush.php dl drupal-5.18
mv drupal-5.18 drupal-5.x
mv hostmaster drupal-5.x/profiles/
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Configuring Apache - Required modules and Include directive

logout
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sudo a2enmod php5
sudo a2enmod rewrite
sudo vim /etc/apache2/httpd.conf
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
)

resulting files : httpd.conf Configuring MySQL - Creating hostmaster database and account

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mysqladmin -uroot -ppass create hostmaster
echo "GRANT ALL ON hostmaster.* TO 'hostmaster'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password'" |
   mysql -uroot  -ppass hostmaster
)

Configuring PHP - Setting the memory limit

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sudo vim /etc/php5/cli/php.ini
sudo vim /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
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Change permissions of settings.php file

sudo chmod 777 /var/aegir/drupal-5.x/sites/default/settings.php

Add user to www-data group

sudo adduser aegir www-data

Configuring sudo - Give Aegir user permission to restart apache

sudo visudo

Added line :

aegir ALL=NOPASSWD: /usr/sbin/apache2ctl

Configuring MySQL - Add super user account

mysql -uroot -ppass mysql;

Ran command :

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'aegir'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password'  WITH GRANT OPTION;

Hosting setup

su - aegir
cd /var/aegir/drupal-5.x
/var/aegir/drush/drush.php hosting setup

Running hosting dispatch manually

~/drush/drush.php --root=/var/aegir/drupal-5.x hosting dispatch

Downloading extra platform

~/drush/drush.php dl drupal-6.12

Thanks to the wonderful Jonathan Coulton for the (cc licensed) intro music.