BOA stands for Barracuda, Octopus, and Ægir—a high-performance LEMP stack supporting Drupal from Pressflow 6 to the latest Drupal 10 (and soon Drupal 11), as well as Backdrop CMS and Grav CMS (soon).
Ægir, named after the Norse god of the sea, is an open-source hosting system for managing multiple Drupal sites. The name Ægir was chosen to reflect the relationship between Drupal's water drop logo, symbolizing individual sites, and Ægir's role as the god of the ocean, representing the hosting of many Drupal sites together. It automates tasks such as site installation, upgrades, and maintenance, making your life easier.
- Site Management: Manage multiple Drupal sites from a single interface.
- Automation: Automate code deployment, database updates, and site backups.
- Scalability: Easily scale your Drupal hosting infrastructure.
- Multitenancy: Share a codebase across multiple sites with separate databases.
- Open-Source: Customize and extend Ægir to fit your needs.
- Integration with Drush: Use powerful command-line tools for site administration.
Barracuda is a specially tuned hosting environment for Ægir, designed to be lightning fast and agile, just like the barracuda fish known for its incredible speed and agility in the ocean.
Octopus is a smart system designed to manage multiple Ægir instances within Barracuda. Just like the sea creature with eight limbs, Octopus allows you to create and manage many separate but connected Ægir instances, showcasing its intelligence and adaptability in efficiently handling complex hosting environments.
BOA remains a Free/Libre Open Source Project. While all of BOA code is Free/Libre Open Source, only the BOA LTS branch and Ægir are available without any cost or restrictions.
Check out the details in DUALLICENSE.md.
- High Performance: Ensure your sites run fast.
- Security: Keep your sites and system secure.
- Automation: Minimize daily maintenance with automated system and OS upgrades.
Leverage one Ægir Master Instance and multiple Satellite Instances. Use Satellite Instances to host your sites, as the Master holds the central Nginx configuration. Note: The 'Master' and 'Satellite' names in the Barracuda/Octopus context are not related to the multi-server Ægir features but to the multi-instance environment with virtual chroot/jail for each Ægir Satellite instance.
- BOA: Runs Barracuda and Octopus to install complete BOA system.
- BARRACUDA: Upgrades the system and the Ægir Master Instance.
- OCTOPUS: Updates Ægir Instances + Drupal platforms.
Follow the guidelines in docs/CONTRIBUTING.md.
- Basic sysadmin skills and experience.
- Willingness to accept BOA PI (paranoid idiosyncrasies).
- Minimum 4 GB RAM and 2 CPUs (8 GB RAM and 4+ CPUs with Solr).
- SSH (RSA) keys for root are required by newer OpenSSH versions used in BOA.
- Wget must be installed.
- Open outgoing TCP ports: 25, 53, 80, 443.
- Locales with UTF-8 support, otherwise en_US.UTF-8 (default) is forced.
Check out the details in docs/PROVIDES.md.
- LXC
- KVM
- VServer
- Hyper-V
- OpenVZ
- Parallels
- VirtualBox
- VMware ESXi
- Xen
- Daedalus (fully supported)
- Chimaera (supported but upgrade recommended)
- Beowulf (supported for upgrades)
- Bookworm (supported only as a base for migration to Devuan)
- Bullseye (supported only as a base for migration to Devuan)
- Buster (supported only as a base for migration to Devuan)
- Stretch (deprecated but still works, please upgrade to Chimaera)
- Jessie (deprecated but still works, please upgrade to Chimaera)
Check out the details in ROADMAP
- Installation Instructions: docs/INSTALL.md
- Upgrade Instructions: docs/UPGRADE.md
- Major-Upgrade Instructions: docs/MAJORUPGRADE.md
- Importance of Keeping SKYNET Enabled in BOA: docs/SKYNET.md
- INI configuration per site: docs/ini/site/INI.md
- INI configuration per platform: docs/ini/platform/INI.md
- Configuration Templates: docs/cnf/barracuda.cnf, docs/cnf/octopus.cnf
- System Control Files Index: docs/ctrl/system.ctrl
- New Backups for BOA SysAdmin docs/BACKUP_ROOT.md
- New Backups for Octopus Lshell User docs/BACKUP_USER.md
- New Backups Retention Policy Configuration docs/BACKUP_RETENTION.md
- Supported Regions and Bucket Creation Guidelines docs/BACKUP_REGIONS.md
- Composer How-To: docs/COMPOSER.md
- Dev-Mode Notes: docs/DEVELOPMENT.md
- Drupal Contrib Modules: docs/MODULES.md
- Extra Comments: docs/CAVEATS.md
- FAQ: docs/FAQ.md
- Fast DB Operations: docs/MYQUICK.md
- Fast Migrate/Clone: docs/FASTTRACK.md
- Included Platforms: docs/PLATFORMS.md
- Let’s Encrypt: docs/SSL.md
- Migration (Octopus Instance): docs/MIGRATE.md
- Migration (Single Site): docs/REMOTE.md
- New Relic How-To: docs/NEWRELIC.md
- Nginx Custom Rewrites: docs/REWRITES.md
- PHP-CLI and Drush Configuration How-To: docs/DRUSH-CLI.md
- PHP-FPM Configuration How-To: docs/PHP-FPM.md
- Remote S3 Backups: docs/BACKUPS.md
- Ruby Gems and NPM: docs/GEM.md
- Security Settings: docs/SECURITY.md
- Self-Upgrade How-To: docs/SELFUPGRADE.md
- Solr and Jetty How-To: docs/SOLR.md
- SSH Encryption: docs/BLOWFISH.md
- VServer Cluster: docs/CLUSTER.md (deprecated)
- BOA User Handbook (legacy): Learn BOA
- Ægir Docs (legacy): Ægir Project
BOA is maintained by Omega8.cc.
Thanks to the Ægir Project founders and developers. Ægir Team.
Support BOA development by purchasing a commercial license or using Omega8.cc hosted services. Check out Omega8.cc for more info.
Thank you for supporting BOA!