Drush - why did I ignore it for so long?

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petercook's picture

I have read lots of posts and listened to plenty of conversations about drush but just kept putting off checking it out for myself. If that sounds like you then visit here http://drupal.org/project/drush and here http://drupal.org/node/477684 and try it out, even if you have just one drupal site.

Installation is pretty straight forward. After unpacking the tar.gz the only other thing I needed to do was install the php cli (command line interface , I guess). On a ubuntu server assuming you have php5 then sudo apt-get install php5-cli is all you need to do. After that I read though the various commands available and tried the following on a test site with an out of date core and other out of date modules:
drush pm update
I answered "yes" to 3 questions and behold core is up to date as are the 8 previously out of date modules. And yes the site still works.

Amazing.

Comments

Timid

mudsurfer's picture

I've been in same situation, tempted but bit too timid to put the time aside to have a crack at it. My reluctance is compounded by the fact that my client sites arebmostly hosted on shared hosting. But your enthusiasm has me interested again... Maybe I'll take another look.

try it just in case

sime's picture

If you can shell into your shared host, and run PHP on the command line, then you can possibly run Drush. I know a lot of shared hosts don't allow it but the last one I used, which was WHM/Cpanel based, did allow a jailed shell for a small fee. Just try shelling in and running: php --info

Drush on Shared host - Dreamhost

mudsurfer's picture

So I have finally pulled my finger out and started setting up Drush on my shared host dev/test environment. I use Dreamhost, and it provides shell access.
I'm on windows 7 machines - so found and installed putty as a SSH client.
Installed Drush 4.2 on my web root - for some reason could not do that through shell, but uploaded and extracted via FTP.
Instructions I found (http://abhishek.nagar.me/blogs/drush-dreamhost) told me to add some lines to .bash_profile, which was confusing as it did not seem to exist. Had to log out of shell, and back in to find it. Then all seemed good. Was able to get in and run "drush help" and see it work - Great Excitement!
Now - to business... I have an old test site that is running 6.16, so I thought I'll give it a run and see if I culd use Drush to update it.
Looking for instructions for what commands to run... I THINK that "drush site-update" should do the trick - but then I need an "alias"... now to work out how to do that..
Me thinks I need to find a "drush for dummies" article...

update: so I'm able to "dl drupal" - that works fine - but get error like "needs a higher bootstrap level to run - you will need invoke drush from a more functional Drupal environment to run this command." on a heap fo the install or update commands. Suspect this is due to an issue accessing the database...
Have been googling frantically for 2 hours, some leads, but nothing definate. I'm giving up on this tonight, might try again another day.

"higher bootstrap level" error

anacaona's picture

Hey mudsurfer,

The same thing happened to me once, and I realized the issue was that I wasn't in a drupal site directory [ie /sites/default or /sites/yoursite.com].

Try running the drush commands from one of those directories to see if it works.

anacaona

Yeah and in a multi-site

enrique.delgado's picture

Yeah and in a multi-site drupal install, you can still run drush from the drupal root directory, but you will have to specify the -l option to specify which site you are working with.

drush = awesome

enap's picture

Drush saves incredible amounts of time - I'm not sure what I'd do without it now. However I work on self managed VPS's so have no issues installing as needed.

Its definately worth looking into.

dev machine

rcross's picture

just an FYI - you don't need to have drush on your server to take advantage of it. In many ways, it is arguably more important to have on your development machine.

drush cc -all
drush fu all
drush en module1 module2 module3

Drush is fun

kim.pepper's picture

I have a little giggle every time I type drush fu all

Kim

drush makes my day

sarah's picture

Kim, you may be my new favourite g.d.o person. So glad I'm not the only one ;o)

-Sarah

Me too. I love childishness.

cb's picture

Me too.

I love childishness. :)

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