Exporting sites out of Aegir

Extracting a Drupal site from Aegir

You may occasionally want to take a Drupal site hosted on a server managed with Aegir and put it somewhere else. This is pretty easy, but not quite as simple as moving a normal Drupal site not managed by Aegir from one machine to another. In brief, you have to copy the site, delete the drushrc.php file, and replace settings.php with a copy of the default configuration file. More specifically:

1. Make a backup of your site in Aegir.
2. Download the same copy of drupal core to the new server (and re-apply core patches, if any).
3. Copy sites/all/ to the new server.
4. Copy the Aegir backup of your site to the new server and unzip in sites/example.com/.
5. Create a database on the new server and import the database backup.
6. Copy any custom site aliases in sites/sites.php to the new server.
7. Copy any custom configuration in local.settings.php to settings.php.
8. Edit settings.php to add the database authentication details for the new server.

That's it!