Drush: Drupal for People Who Hate Mice

(Note that ctools is a required dependency for Views in Drupal 7.)

The Drush dl command (a shortcut for pm-download) is very clever about how it downloads the modules and where it places the extracted folders. By default, it grabs the .tar.gz file from drupal.org and places folders inside the sites/all/modules directory, but you have full control (including using CVS checkouts or where the folders belong). See drush help dl for full details.

As with most tools, people develop their own habits with Drush, but here are a few built-in commands you are likely to appreciate (at least in time):

Running drush help in your Drupal directory always will give you the list of currently available commands (based on modules installed and so forth). For more information on each command, run drush help <command>.

You may have noticed that we ran our drush commands above from inside the Drupal install directory. This allows Drush to determine which Drupal site (and configuration options) to use. However, for those looking for a bit more freedom and particularly those working within Drupal “multi-site” environments, you need to make use of the --root and --uri switches for Drush. This can lead to a lot of repetitive typing. If you have only a single Drupal site, you can specify these options (and lots more) by creating a .drushrc.php file in your home directory. See the example.drushrc.php file in the examples folder of your Drush installation for more details.

For those of you who work on several Drupal sites across various versions and installations, Drush provides an “alias” mechanism to define the common parameters. To create an alias for this example site here, you can create a file ~/.drush/aliases.drushrc.php containing the following PHP code:

$aliases['example'] = array(
  'root' => '/var/www/example/drupal',
  'uri' => 'example.com',
);

Now you can run drush commands for your example site from any directory using drush @example <command> (for example, drush @example status). To make things even better, aliases can reference remote sites (accessible via SSH) by including the remote-host and remote-user options. See the example.aliases.drushrc.php file from the examples folder in your Drush install directory for full details.

With each new release, Drush includes more commands, and Drupal modules are increasingly offering Drush commands with their releases. If that's not enough (and you aren't afraid of writing some PHP), you can write your own Drush commands. The examples folder in your Drush install includes a sample command, make-me-a-sandwich (XKCD fans rejoice!), for those interested in learning more.

One of the greatest testaments to the power of Drush is the Aegir Hosting Platform (see Resources), which provides a mass-hosting environment (with support for multiserver installations). Although it includes a Web interface, Aegir does all of its heavy lifting via custom Drush commands.

If you work with Drupal and hate using your mouse (or prefer your terminal), Drush can save you countless hours of clicking and open a whole new world of scripted Drupal tasks.