Drupal Development Tricks for Designers

Chapter 6. Making Drupal Easier: Working with Drush Make and Installation Profiles

As you continue working in Drupal, you’ll likely notice that you use certain modules again and again. Normally, you’d start off a project by downloading and enabling each module manually; you may even end up compiling, as I did for a while, a checklist of modules that belong on every project. While a checklist is a convenient way to remember all the modules you typically use, it still takes time to download and install them. Even using Drush to do it can get monotonous at times—and if you’re doing a lot of modules, it’s easy to make a mistake and type the wrong filename. And while you could also create a local installation that serves as a “base install” with all your configurations, it takes time and effort to keep the code and modules updated in the base installation, and creating a new site requires not only copying those files into a new folder, but copying the database as well. It’s not the worst workflow, but it’s not the most efficient either.

What if there was a way for you to run a script that would download Drupal for you, download all your modules and base themes, and basically create your file structure for you so you can get to work on configuring modules and designing something awesome? That’s what Drush Make is for. Drush Make is an extension for Drush that will allow you to specify:

• Which core version you want to download (e.g. 6.x or 7.x)

• Which modules you want

• Which base theme you’d ...