Aegir-up (Vagrant-based Aegir virtual machine)

Aegir-up provides a collaborative, distributed development environment, that encourages the use of Drupal best-practices. It deploys the Aegir Hosting System in a local virtual environment for development and testing. 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.

From a technical stand-point, Aegir-up is a Drush extension that implements so called blueprint to use by Drush Vagrant. This, in turn, builds a virtual machine atop Vagrant and Virtualbox, and configures it using Puppet.

VM life cycle

Setup your system

1. Install system dependencies: Drush, Vagrant, VirtualBox and, optionally, an NFS-server (ref.)
2. Install Drush dependencies (Drush Vagrant Integration and Drush Hosts):
   drush dl drush-vagrant drush-hosts (ref.)
3. Install Aegir-up:
   drush dl aegir-up

Create VM

1. Build a new project:
   drush vagrant-build
2. Respond to prompts for additional information required to build your project
3. Wait while the Vagrant base box is downloaded (this will take a few minutes, but is only required once)
4. Wait a couple more minutes while your VM is provisioned
5. The output contains a one-time login link to access your new Aegir VM (printed in red within the provisioning messages part)

Use the VM

1. Start the VM with
   drush @your-vm-alias vagrant up
2. Become the Aegir user
   drush @your-vm-alias vagrant-shell
3. Become Vagrant user
   cd <vagrant project dir>; vagrant ssh to get a shell
4. Stop the VM with
   drush @your-vm-alias vagrant suspend

Rebuild the VM

1. If your broke something just run
   drush @your-vm-alias vagrant-rebuild

More info

For further information see the documentation. Or Look in related issue queue's.

For a better idea of where we're headed with Aegir-up, check out the #1459218: Roadmap. Feel free to suggest features and improvements in that issue, or #1480390: META: Aegir-up commands.

Caveat

N.B. Aegir-up is NOT intended for production hosting.

While we hope you find Aegir-up useful for development and testing, out-of-the-box it is not equiped for production use (i.e., minimal or no security, monitoring, backup/restore facilities, &c.)

For fully managed, production-grade Aegir servers and services, check out Koumbit's AegirVPS services, or other Aegir Service Providers.