Glossary (for maintainers)

The words this area uses without stopping to define them, each with a pointer to the page that owns it. The site-owner glossary covers the tenant-side vocabulary; this one is for people reading and changing the tree.

The stack

Barracuda — the system installer/upgrader: OS packages, Nginx, PHP, Percona, the Ægir Master instance. Its CLI wrapper is barracuda; the staged installer it fetches and runs is BARRACUDA.sh.txt.

Octopus — the per-tenant platform manager: one Satellite Ægir instance per oN account. Wrapper octopus, staged installer OCTOPUS.sh.txt.

Ægir (Provision / Hosting / Hostmaster) — the hosting framework BOA forks: provision is the Drush-side backend that renders vhosts and runs tasks, hosting the Drupal-side frontend modules, hostmaster the install profile of the control-panel site. All omega8cc forks — never reason from pre-fork upstream defaults (fork model).

Master vs Satellite — the Master is the box-level Ægir instance Barracuda maintains (/var/aegir); Satellites are the per-tenant instances Octopus builds (/data/disk/oN). The staged setup chain differs: install internals.

BOA.sh.txt — the wget -qO- | bash bootstrap: fetches the wrappers and staged installers, runs the fleet-normalisation _update_agents block, and dispatches boa in-* installs.

Release machinery

Tree (dev / lts / pro) — which delivery line a box tracks. dev boxes auto-enable installer debug markers and other maintainer conveniences; lts/pro are the shipped lines, and only their tags trigger fleet auto-update.

Branches — the public repo's 5.x-dev / -base / -edge and the 5.x-lts / 5.x-pro release branches; tags land only on lts/pro (release model).

Serials (fNN) — per-tool version stamps on every fetched tool; hand-rolled and counting down, so a lower number is newer. Bumping a tool's serial is what delivers it fleet-wide on the next self-update pass — same commit as the change, always (serial pipeline).

Fetched tools — the scripts BOA re-downloads from the mirrors onto boxes (/opt/local/bin). A tool not in the fetch list is never delivered, however long it lives in the tree.

SKYNET — the tag-driven hourly auto-update (security urgency); SELFUPGRADE — the operator-scheduled weekly/monthly cadence (autoupboa). Complementary, not alternatives (SELFUPGRADE reference).

Install machinery

Wrappers vs staged installers — barracuda/octopus/boa are thin CLI wrappers that fetch, stage and launch the real installers (BARRACUDA.sh.txt/OCTOPUS.sh.txt) with settings includes staged under /var/backups. Behaviour differences between the wrapper and staged layers (argument parsing, marker propagation) are load-bearing.

AegirSetup A/B/C/M — the four staged scripts that build an Ægir instance under su privilege boundaries: A/B/C are the Satellite chain, M the Master (staged setup engine).

The state bus — the append-only variable hand-off that survives the su boundaries between stages; environment exports do not (hostmaster upgrade).

Markers — /root/.*.cnf presence files: some operator knobs, some BOA-managed state, some both. Presence is the value; content usually irrelevant. The complete index is the control-file reference; the marker vs .barracuda.cnf-variable conversion pattern ("the variable is the supported switch, the file honoured for one release") recurs throughout.

_DEBUG_MODE — the installer verbosity switch; without it dozens of command groups discard their output. Markers, propagation quirks and the one destructive sibling: debugging a staged run.

Box classifications

Hosted vs self-hosted — hosted-fleet boxes (the host8 marker or an .aegir.cc hostname) get fleet normalisation passes that create and erase markers ordinary boxes keep; when a marker "won't stick", check whether a hosted pass owns it.

PX0 / migration proxy — a retained box reduced to the web-proxy role after its accounts migrated away (PX0 proxy shrink).