Until this year we wrote every line of BOA by hand, and we told the story of how that changed in August, so here only the score. In 2025 we made three stable releases and in 2026 eleven so far, six of them in forty-one days of the summer. The third quarter of 2026 is the busiest in the sixteen years of BOA’s public stable branch, and our Provision fork has not seen a quarter like it since the spring of 2010, when Adrian and the original crew were still writing it.
Since last October the main development branch of all four on drupal.org carries the BOA code (the Ægir 5 rewrite continues separately at Consensus Enterprises, and we wish it well). Nobody planned it that way, least of all Steven, but the question he asked that April ended with the Ægir 3 projects maintained by the people who now build them with AI tools, so the prophet gave his own prophecy a push without meaning to, and we owe him a drink for that at least.
On 7 December 2017 Ægir turned ten, and ComputerMinds marked the day with a short interview in which Mike Dixon asked Steven Jones, then one of the Ægir core maintainers, what the project could look like ten years later. Steven gave the sensible answer first, something headless and decentralised, and then the one people remembered: alternatively, “Aegir will become some sort of AI and start provisioning political cat gif websites”, all for wicked purposes of its own. The interview is still online, and so is the cat.
In fairness to them, our installer has a past. In 2010 you downloaded the script, opened it in nano to type your e-mail address into the code, and ran it. Today it is wget -qO- https://files.boa.io/BOA.sh.txt | bash and then one line like boa in-lts public server.mydomain.org my@email o1 php-min silent, and the install page explains it word by word.
The colleagues at bluedrop.fr and Evolix in France published their own recipe a month later, on Debian with Apache, said it would carry their platforms until 2026 and promised a successor written from scratch, thanked us twice for the patches, and mentioned that they tested BOA as well and found it a very specific thing and hard for them to use. We took it with a grin, because a stack named after a barracuda, an octopus and a sea giant, with a Kraken for its latest release, was never going to be a goldfish.
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The only release with AI in its name, the AI Policy Edition of June, works in the opposite direction: it lets every site decide which AI crawlers may come in, and the ones which only collect training data find the door closed unless you open it. So one of the first things our AI-assisted monster did with its new powers was to lock the other robots out.
It is 2026 now, and the French colleagues kept their word: the successor is called Dropfactory, it is out since last November, and we could not help noticing that it runs on Nginx. Welcome to the club!
The less funny part of those ten years is that Ægir itself nearly did not make it. Around 2023 the general opinion was that Ægir 3 could never run Drupal 10, because its engine is Drush 8 and Drupal had moved on. That autumn we reported we were almost there, screenshots attached, and by the next summer three other teams had Drupal 10 running on Ægir 3 too, each building on pieces of our Drush and Provision forks and each saying so, which we appreciated a lot.
The installer had jokes before it had a proper name, and at the very end of a run that Dummies Edition printed CARD: Now charging your credit card for this automated install service... and then JOKE: Just kidding!. It still does it sixteen years later, with a pause long enough to let you sweat, only the service became a magic show, and since 2015 it sits the exam as well: when the barracuda command checks whether an upgrade went through, one of the lines it looks for in the log is CARD: Now charging.
We arrived in 2009 and kept the theme going without asking anyone. Our installer was split in two in the summer of 2010 and the halves were named Barracuda and Octopus, the three together made BOA, which is a snake and not even a sea one, and this August a release went out as the Kraken Edition, with a changelog line saying that the Kraken “joins Barracuda, Octopus and Ægir in the bestiary”. Eldir is still here too, he is the theme which dresses the control panel today as it did in our scripts of November 2009, so of all the cast it is the doorman who never missed a day.
The project’s own explanation was that if Drupal is a drop of water, then Ægir is the god of rather larger bodies of it. Even the old IRC bot was called Hefring, after one of Ægir’s nine daughters, who are waves.
Steven was one of them. In his article he wrote that it works, that it is a rather wild thing to look at and that our fixes are sticking plaster, he thanked us anyway, and he was right on all three counts. (Steven, the patch link in that article is dead since we replaced that file last year. Sorry, that one is on us.)
Skynet arrived the same way. In April 2012 a commit titled “Replace boring welcome messages with something funny!” made the installer greet you with BOA Skynet welcomes you aboard!, which was five and a half years before Steven’s interview, so we cannot even claim we fulfilled his prophecy, we got there first and by accident. By January 2015 the joke had a real job and received an off switch, _SKYNET_MODE. Today it is the agent which wakes up every five minutes on every BOA server and refreshes its own tools, and where nobody switched it off it also refreshes the self-healing scripts, looks at a quarter past four in the morning for a new release, and keeps the security updates of the operating system flowing between upgrades.
And then, in April 2025, something happened which no prophet would write for himself. Steven opened an issue on drupal.org asking whether Hostmaster, Hosting, Provision and Eldir should be marked unmaintained and obsolete, a responsible question about projects whose last stable release was from 2020, and we answered the same day that we would take over the maintenance of the Ægir 3 components. The project leader supported it, and the discussion ended with Steven recording that people agreed the projects should count as maintained, to some degree, by us, which he said suited him.
It helps to remember where the names come from, because this family had monsters in it from the first day. Ægir, the system which runs a fleet of Drupal sites from one Drupal site, is named after the sea giant of the Norse myths, the one who brews the ale and throws the feasts for the gods in his hall, which makes him, if you think about it, the first hosting provider on record. Eldir (the name means fire-stoker) is his servant, who meets Loki at the door and tells him that nobody inside has a kind word for him, and he was luckier than his colleague Fimafeng, who was killed by Loki at the same party.
The keeping-current page has the list of what Skynet does on its own and what still waits for your command. For the record, the cat gif part did not happen: a BOA server never creates a site by itself, sites are made by people in the Ægir panel, and what runs unattended is the dull kind of autonomy, watchdogs which restart a fallen service within seconds and a task queue which unwedges itself. No wicked purposes were detected so far, although we would say that, wouldn’t we?
It even talks about itself, because when you log in as root the Skynet Agent welcomes you aboard, and when you refresh its tools by hand in that session it reports BOA Skynet Agent is Active, OK! and points at the config file where one line will do “to disable me, if needed”, which is more courtesy than the original ever showed.
Authored and reviewed by Adam, co-founder and human.
Fact-checking and drafting: Claude Code on Fable 5.1.
Graphics: courtesy of ChatGPT Pro, designed by Fable and Adam.
We read it again this week and did the arithmetic. The ten years run out on 7 December 2027, so there are fourteen months left on the clock, and we have to report that the prophecy is doing uncomfortably well, because one half of it came true five years before Steven made it and the other half arrived this year. The agent which looks after every server running BOA, the open source Drupal hosting stack we grew around Ægir, is called Skynet since 2012 (no, really), and since 2026 the stack is built with the newest AI tools at a pace we never managed by hand, so only the cat gifs are late.
What came out of it is on the releases page: Backdrop sites running beside Drupal and Drupal CMS ones, a way to import a classic Ægir install into BOA, and docs.boa.io, which did not exist a year ago. In August The Drop Times wrote up our Drupal 7 to Backdrop workflow, with a reporter’s care to note that our test matrix is our own claim and no independent finding, which is fair, and which we enjoyed anyway, because two years earlier the news about Ægir was about extending its service life.
Ægir turns nineteen on 7 December, and the prophecy has until the December after that. Seeing the pace, I would not bet against the cat gifs any more, although if BOA ever starts provisioning political cats on its own, we promise an off switch for that too. And Steven, the cat site is yours whenever you want it: one task in the panel, made by hand, for no purposes at all.
Our own chapter started with a small lie. In January 2010 Ægir spoke only Apache and we wanted Nginx, which was far from the obvious choice for Drupal then, so the first public version of what became BOA was an Nginx config with one patch, standing on Brian Mercer’s earlier Nginx work as its README duly said, and the same README asked you to give Ægir /bin/true as the command for restarting Apache. Ægir went on believing it was configuring Apache, Nginx served the sites, and everybody was happy (Apache was not consulted).
A few months later Adrian Rossouw, the father of Ægir, started proper Nginx support in Provision, committed a patch of ours for it the very next day, and we kept committing in that corner of the project for years. By the end of that July our installer was out under the name “Aegir with Nginx for Dummies Edition”, which tells you how seriously we took ourselves.
One part the prophecy got backwards is where the AI lives, which is on our desks: nothing on a BOA box guesses or phones a model, the agent called Skynet is plain bash, and the tests every change has to pass are the old-fashioned kind, a real install and a real upgrade on a throwaway machine.
Full upgrades run unattended only on the schedule you give them, and a new kernel may reboot the box only between four and five in the morning, and only where you allowed it, so the sea monster drives itself only on the roads and at the hours you gave it, and our Judgment Day comes with a maintenance window. Here is a test box keeping its own Sunday appointment, greeting and credit card included (the picture opens at full size when you click it).
