The Aegir project just released Aegir 0.4 alpha 9 and with it comes some exciting new features. The biggest, and which I previously wrote about, is multi-server support, meaning that Aegir now can host websites on any number of web or database servers and can seamlessly move a site from one server to another. Bringing multi-server support to Aegir has been our main goal for version 0.4 and is the result of several months of active development in different feature branches by many different contributors, so we are very excited to announce that this is now a reality.

Biggest new features

• Vastly simplified installation. Once the initial server configuration is done, all you need to do is run a single bash script to install Aegir. There are now fewer places you can go astray during installation.
• Support for external web and database servers. This is a necessity for any real installation and Aegir can now manage your development, staging, and live environments.
• Ability to move sites between servers. We have made significant improvements to the dev->qa->live workflow, and Aegir can now take a copy of the live site and publish it on your development server under a different domain name.
• Support for sites encrypted with SSL. This is important for many sites, specifically those that have e-commerce requirements. You can even make use of shared wildcard certificates.
• Support for the nginx web server. A good abstraction layer needs at least two implementations, and to that end we decided to add full support for nginx. It even supports SSL.
• Experimental support for web server clusters. This enables you to host your sites across multiple web servers simultaneously. You can even migrate sites between clusters.

This release is by far the most significant release we have made as a project, not only in terms of new features but also in terms of bugs fixed and issues closed. During its development, we have closed more than a hundred tickets in addition to adding new features. Full details on new features and tasks completed can be found in the release notes.

What’s next

We are getting close to a stable Aegir 0.4. There is one last feature that we will implement before that release - the ability to provision and manage DNS for hosted sites. This is even more important now that we can migrate sites between web servers. DNS support is slated for alpha 10, at which point we’ll start beta testing and move on to a stable release.

Our community rocks

Chapter Three was a major supporter of this release, contributing funding to make it possible and also Neil Drumm’s time to co-develop the multi-server functionality with us. He had commit access to the git repository and was instrumental in helping us get the details right.

We would also like to thank the other members of the Aegir community who contributed to the many patches that have been included in the alpha 9. In particular, we want to give a big thank you to Omega8cc for the infrastructure they provided to help us test this version.

We’ll be moving fast in the coming month toward the stable release. Follow @aegirproject for updates as we code.