Self-Hosting BOA

This guide is for you if you want to run your own BOA server and you're not (yet) a seasoned sysadmin. You own one box — a VPS or a dedicated server — and you'd like BOA to do the heavy lifting so you can host Drupal sites without becoming a full-time system administrator first.

The scope is narrow on purpose, and it covers what you actually need:

• Install BOA cleanly onto a fresh box.
• Keep it current — BOA updates itself, and you run the occasional upgrade by hand.
• Recover — get back on your feet when a service won't start, you're locked out, or you've run out of disk.

That's the whole promise: BOA is built so it just works. You don't need to understand Ægir internals or hand-tune Nginx to run a solid, secure, self-updating Drupal host.

Every task on the pages below is one clear path, step by step. We tell you what you should see at each stage and roughly how long to wait, and we flag the do-not-panic moments up front — for example, the installer goes quiet for long stretches while it compiles things, and that's completely normal. We don't show you five expert ways to do a thing; we show you the one that works.

Work through them roughly in order the first time. Once you're up and running, you'll mostly come back to Keeping BOA current and When the box breaks.

Outgrown this guide? Performance tuning, security hardening, the monitor stack, the full control-file reference and everything else lives in Operating BOA. That guide assumes you're comfortable with Ægir and Linux internals — so it's the right next step once "install, keep current, recover" no longer covers what you want to do. We point you there at the exact moments a task goes beyond this guide.