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

Last updated on
8 May 2023

This documentation is deprecated.

Please note Aegir-Up is currently unmaintained and unsupported.

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.


Quickstart

  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. Try using blueprint aegir2-dev, especially if encountering issues with other blueprints
  5. Enter your sudo password to add an entry to /etc/hosts, and mount an NFS share
  6. Wait while the Vagrant base box is downloaded (this will take a few minutes, but is only required once)
  7. Wait a couple more minutes while your VM is provisioned
  8. 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 instructions getting aegir-up running on Windows / cygwin, see issue #1879086 on drush-vagrant.


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 on that issue, or #1480390: META: Aegir-up commands.

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