Creating and managing a site

This is the everyday work of running your hosting: making a new site, then looking after it. Everything on this page happens in the Aegir control panel (the web UI you log into) — no server access, no root, nothing to install. You fill in a form or click a button, Aegir queues a task, and a few moments later your site reflects the change.

If you're new to the three words platform, site and client, read the concepts page first — it's a two-minute mental model that makes this page click into place.

Create a new site

A site is one live website: its own domain, its own database, its own files. Here's how to make one.

Log in to your control panel.
Go to Content and choose to add a Site (the same form is reachable from the Add site tab on your sites list).
Fill in the form. The fields, in the order Aegir asks for them:
- Domain name — the address your site will answer on, like shop.example.com. Point this domain's DNS at your hosting before you install, so the site is reachable and can get its HTTPS certificate later.
- Install profile — the kind of Drupal site to install (for example Standard or Minimal, or a distribution your host has made available). The panel's own help puts it simply: the type of site to install. Your choice here also decides which platforms are offered next.
- Platform — the codebase your site will run on. Only platforms that support the profile you picked are shown, so if you don't see one you expected, it's because it doesn't carry that profile. Pick the platform whose Drupal version you want.
- Language — the language the site is installed in. Defaults to English.
- Database server — which database server hosts the site's data. If your account only has one, it's already selected for you and there's nothing to change; you'll only have a real choice here when more than one is available to you.
Submit the form.

That's it from your side. Aegir queues an Install task, builds the database, writes the web server configuration, and runs the Drupal installer for you. Watch the task log (below) to follow along. When it finishes successfully your site is live at the domain you entered, and Aegir gives you a one-time link to log in as the site's admin user.

You don't choose or manage the database yourself — Aegir creates it, names it, and wires it up as part of the install. The same goes for the web server configuration and the file layout on disk. Your job is the four or five choices on the form; the plumbing is done for you.

The tasks you'll use most

Open one of your sites in the control panel and you'll see a row of task buttons. Each one, when you click it, queues a background job and shows you a live log. These are the ones you'll reach for, in plain terms:

Verify Site — re-checks the site and regenerates all its configuration to match what the control panel says. Think of it as the "make everything match again" button. It's completely safe to run any time a site looks out of step after a change. More on exactly what it does below.
Backup — takes a snapshot of the site (database plus files) on demand, kept so you can restore to it later.
Restore — rolls the site back to one of its backups. A fresh backup is always taken first, so rolling back can't lose your current state.
Disable — takes the site offline temporarily. It stops being reachable, but nothing is deleted and you can enable it again whenever you like.
Enable — brings a disabled site back online.
Reset password — generates a one-time login link for the site's admin user. Handy when you've locked yourself out of your own Drupal.
Delete Site — removes the site completely. Its last backup is kept, but otherwise the action can't be undone — the panel asks you to confirm before it goes ahead.

The tasks below cover the ones this page is about: Verify, Disable/Enable, and Delete. Backup and Restore have their own topic.

What the Verify task actually does

Verify Site is the workhorse task, so it's worth understanding. When you run it, Aegir looks at what the control panel believes about your site and rewrites the site's configuration on the server to match — the Drupal settings file, the web server entry, and the rest of the generated config. It confirms the site is correctly installed and brings everything back in line with the front end.

Run Verify when:

a site looks out of sync after you changed something (added a domain alias, changed a setting, and so on);
a task told you to re-verify;
you just want to be sure a site's configuration is freshly regenerated.

Because Verify regenerates the site's settings file, any hand-edits you may have made directly to that generated file are overwritten. That's expected — the supported way to add your own settings is through the tuning files described in Which file do I edit?, not by editing the generated file, precisely because Verify will rewrite it.

Disable and enable a site

To take a site offline without deleting it — for maintenance, or because it's not ready for visitors yet:

Open the site in the control panel.
Click Disable and confirm.

The site stops being reachable; visitors no longer get through. Everything stays intact behind the scenes — the database, the files, the backups. When you're ready, open the site again and click Enable to bring it straight back online.

You can tell a site's state at a glance from its status in the panel: an Enabled site is live, a Disabled site is offline but preserved. (New sites show as Queued while their install is still waiting to run.)

Delete a site

When you're truly finished with a site:

Open the site in the control panel.
Click Delete Site and confirm.

Deleting removes the site from the hosting system. Its last backup is kept so you're not left with nothing, but the deletion itself can't be undone — so double-check you've picked the right site, and take a fresh Backup first if you might ever want the data again. If you only need the site off for a while, use Disable instead — that's fully reversible.

Reading a site's task log

Every button you click here runs as a task, and each task keeps its own log so you can see exactly what happened.

Where to find it. Each site lists its recent tasks. Click a task to open its page, where the log streams as the task runs and stays afterwards as a record.

What the status words mean. A task moves through a small set of states, shown next to it:

Status	What it means for you
Queued	The task is waiting its turn. It'll start on its own within a minute or two — you don't have to do anything.
Processing	The task is running right now. The log updates as it goes.
Successful	It finished cleanly. Nothing more to do.
Warning	It finished, but with something worth a glance in the log — usually harmless, occasionally a hint.
Failed	It didn't complete. Open the log, read the message near the end, and fix what it points at (a domain that doesn't resolve yet, for example) before trying again.

You don't have to watch. Tasks run in the background. You can close the page and come back; the log and the final status will be waiting. A Failed task can usually just be retried once you've dealt with whatever the log flagged.

If a task fails and the log points at something on the server itself — a full disk, a service that's down, anything you have no way to touch from the control panel or your own shell — that's not yours to fix. Don't go hunting for a workaround: open a support request with your host or operator and quote the failing task's log.

A note on your own shell

Most of what's on this page is pure control-panel work. If you also have your oN.ftp shell login, you can inspect files and run drush against your installed sites from there — see Shell and SFTP access. But you never need the shell just to create, verify, disable or delete a site: the control panel does all of that on its own.

Where to go next

New to the vocabulary? Sites, platforms and clients is the friendly mental model behind everything above.
The full list of exact task names and control-file names lives in the shared Reference.