Setting up remote drush aliases for aegir

Question

I have an aegir platform and I need to set up a drush alias file for all of the sites for our developers. I can't seem to figure out the best practice to do this. Normally we would set our 'remote-user' and that user would have access to drush but on aegir, drush is limited to the aegir user. I've follow these instructions http://community.aegirproject.org/node/427 to make is so certain users can also use aegir but I keep getting 'drush needs a higher bootstrap' error.

I have considered just setting the 'remote-user' user to aegir and then useing passwd to set a password for the aegir user but I'm not sure what secondary effects that could have. Presently we just su as the aegir user when we need drush.

Am I approaching this the correct way or is there a better way to approach this problem?

Answer 1

In BOA you can create sub-accounts (clients) with access limited to only associated sites, plus SSH and Drush available both locally and over SSH, with Drush aliases for all associated sites automatically created and updated for you.

Answer 2

The easiest way is to add the ssh public keys of the developers to the .ssh/authorized_keys file of the aegir user. This however grants access to all sites.

The https://drupal.org/project/provisionacl module could help to get separate unix accounts access to selected sites.