Using drush makefiles

Spent some time over the past few days setting up a drush makefile.
Drush is the Drupal Shell, and if you’re not using it you should be. Drush MAKE is a great function -- It creates a website pre-loaded with the themes and modules you prefer with a single command. All you have to do afterward is enable the ones you want – and you can do that also from Drush.

Setting up a makefile isn’t difficult, but there are a couple of tricks. And the docs don’t explain them well. Here’s what you need to know…

Start out with a fresh install of Drupal. This will become the model for your makefile and the sites you create with it. Using Drush, download the modules and themes you want to include in your site load. The procedure is simple: cd into your site (you do not have to be in the module or themes directory). Use the Drush download command to add themes and modules.

The syntax is simple: drush dl name_of_module_or_theme. It will drop the module or theme into the correct directory. Make certain that all of your modules are for the correct release of Drupal. Drush will automatically get the latest stable release of each module, but if you ask for a Drupal 6 module, Drush will happily add it to your Drupal 7 load. And Drupal won’t be a happy camper. To fix this, you have to delete the out-of-synch module from the directory, flush the caches and reload the module page from inside Drupal.

Once you’ve got all the modules and themes loaded in your base build, it’s time to fire up your site. Create your database and launch Drupal. Now for the fun part: Go to your modules page, and load ALL of the modules. If a module isn’t loaded, Drush won’t see it in the database, and won’t add it to your makefile.

If you’ve got a bunch of modules, load them in stages. There is a memory limitation on the loading of modules, and if you exceed it, you’ll get the infamous white screen. All might not be lost if you get the white screen, so just move on to the next step.

Return to your shell. Change directory to the root of your Drupal site. Run the following command: drush generate-makefile name_of_file.make. This will create the makefile in the current directory.

Now open the file with a text editor (VI, TextWrangler, BBEdit or similar). You should see something like this:

; This file was auto-generated by drush make
core = 7.x

api = 2
projects[drupal][version] = "7.x"

; Modules
projects[admin_menu][version] = "3.0-rc3"

projects[module_filter][version] = "1.7"

; Themes
projects[clean][version] = "1.x-dev"

projects[corporate][version] = "1.5"

projects[corporateclean][version] = "1.5"

projects[marinelli][version] = "3.0-beta11"

projects[om][version] = "2.21"

projects[om_admin][version] = "2.2"

projects[responsive_blog][version] = "1.3"

projects[zen][version] = "5.1"

Check to make sure that all the modules and themes you want in your baseload are listed. If something is missing, you can add it manually. You could make the entire file manually, but it’s less work to do it through Drupal and Drush.

Once you’ve got a good makefile, make a copy and put it in a safe location. To create a new Drupal instance using the makefile, place a copy of it in your htdocs directory. In Drush, change directory into htdocs, and issue the following command: drush make name_of_make_file.make name_of_site.

Drush will report back in verbose mode on everything it creates.

One note: Drush uses the makefile as a shopping list to download all of the requested modules, themes, and Drupal core itself, so you always get the latest version of Drupal core.

This is a simple approach to using Drush MAKE. For notes on more advanced usage, see http://drupal.org/node/1006620