Drupal Development Tricks for Designers

Chapter 3. Installing Drush

Drush is the Drupal Shell, a mighty library of commands that are designed to make your life easier in Drupal. Among the many things you can do with Drush, some of the most exciting (from a designer/site builder’s standpoint) are:

• drush dl module_name: Download any module from drupal.org. You can even download a string of modules by separating the names with spaces.

• drush en module_name: Enable any of the modules that you just downloaded. Like dl, you can enable a string of modules by typing a space-separated list.

• drush up: This is my single favorite thing to use Drush for, and the reason that you, dear reader, MUST LEARN DRUSH. With this simple command, you can update all of your modules and Drupal core in about five minutes, as opposed to the—ahem—considerably longer amount of time it takes to do it manually.

If you’d like to see a demonstration of the merits of using Drush versus installing modules manually, check out the video “More Beer, less effort” from Development Seed: http://developmentseed.org/blog/2009/jun/19/drush-more-beer-less-effort/. Synopsis: installing a site and a pile of modules via Drush versus manually left our hero with an extra hour or more of time on his hands—plenty of time to celebrate with a frosty beverage.

Installing Drush

Grab the Drush package from drupal.org/project/drush. You want to download the tar.gz file containing the latest recommended release (see Figure 3-1).

Note

You can also go to http://www.drush.org/resources to ...