Drush for Drupal on Ubuntu

Drush for Drupal is a great tool and something anyone using Drupal should look into. It can make life so much easier. It is a standalone module so doesn't require you to install it in your Drupal installation to work. It is fairly straightforward installing it in Windows but as usual in a Linux OSX it is so much easier.

First things first, as Drush is a standalone tool it requires the PHP command line interface to work. If your not sure whether you have it or not simply type the following in terminal to get it:

sudo apt-get install php5-cli

Now that's the nuts and bolts we need to get it to work lets download and install Drush.

The first and easiest way to do this if you are using ubuntu is through apt-get, simply type:

sudo apt-get install drush

and that's it you should be ready to use drush.

If you want to go down the longer and more manual way of installing drush you can do the following:

Click to download Drush

Now unpack it and install, as usual in a Linux OSX I will do this in /opt. So in terminal type:

sudo tar xvfz drush-All-Versions-x.x.tar.gz -C /opt

Next we need to create a symbolic link between the following two paths opt/drush/drush and /usr/local/bin/drush. To do so type the following into terminal:

 sudo ln -s /opt/drush/drush /usr/local/bin/

All we have to do now is invoke Drush via root, again in terminal type:

sudo drush

Drush is now installed and ready to use, go ahead and play around with it. There is a useful link here which gives you a good reference to the commands.

I intend to write another blog about creating your own drush hooks, making customised drush functions can save you heaps of time.

Have fun.