How to Drush

A guide to using Drush command line tools.

"What is Drush?"

Drush is a command line shell and Unix scripting interface for Drupal.

Install with Composer

Get composer:

curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php
mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer

Install Drush:

composer global require drush/drush:dev-master

Add drush executable to your system PATH (~/.bash_profile):

export PATH="$HOME/.composer/vendor/bin:$PATH"

Use Drush to Download and Install Drupal

To install a new drupal site, we'll simply create a new directory, grab our make file and run drush make to download the codebase. The make file can pull any version drupal along with any contrib modules we may need:

drush make drush.make.yml

Once we have the codebase we can set up the database using sql-create:

drush sql-create --db-url=mysql://{user}:{pass}@localhost/{database}

and now we can run site-install to complete the installation:

drush site-install standard --account-name=admin --account-pass=admin --db-url=mysql://{user}:{pass}@localhost/{database}

(here's where we'd configure apache virtual hosts to point to our site ...)

We should now be able to access our freshly installed drupal site and login as 'admin'.

Manage Multiple Sites with Aliases

Using site aliases we can easily run drush on any drupal installation running on any server.

Copy file 'aliases.drush.php' to ~/.drush directory

$aliases['dev'] = array(
  'root' => '/var/www/html/drush-dev',
  'uri' => 'drush-dev.local',
);

Now we can target our dev instance from anywhere on the host machine:

drush @dev status

See a list of all available drush site aliases:

drush sa

Syncing Live and Dev Sites

Now that we have aliases set up, we can sync content and configuration changes between multiple instances.

For example, we can run sql-sync to clone the live database to dev:

drush sql-sync @live @dev

Similarly we can copy any file uploads using the rsync command:

drush rsync @live:%files @dev:%files

Everyday Commands

Clear all the caches!

# drupal 7
drush cc all

# drupal 8
drush cache-rebuild

Manage contrib modules:

# download
drush dl {module}

#enable
drush en {module}

#disable
drush dis {module}

Update core and all contrib modules:

drush pm-update

Login as another user

drush user-login {username}

Reset admin password

drush upwd admin --password="password"

Even More Commands

List all enabled contrib modules:

drush pm-list --pipe --type=module --status=enabled --no-core

Run cron:

drush core-cron

Flush imagecache:

drush image-flush {image-style-id}

View documentation:

drush topic