What is Drush?

[Drupalize.Me - Learn Drupal] [♪music♪] [What is Drush?] [Introduction to Drush - Chapter 1] [Addison Berry] Hi there, I'm Addison Berry, and I work for Lullabot, and I'm one of the trainers we have here on Drupalize.Me. Today we're going to be looking at Drush and trying to figure out what exactly Drush is and why you want to use it. The first thing we'll look at is the word itself to help give us a clue about what it is. It's a combination of two words: Drupal, and then the other word is shell. When you combine those two you end up with Drush. A shell is a way to provide a command-line interface for your computer or server that lets you give text commands to accomplish tasks rather than using a user interface by clicking around with a mouse. So that's what the Drupal shell is doing, giving us a command-line interface for Drupal. You can find the project on drupal.org at drupal.org/project/drush. When you get there, you're going to notice that it's not actually a module that you download and install inside of your Drupal site. Because this is providing a command-line interface, this is a project you actually need to download and install on your computer or server. In the next video in this series, we'll be looking at all the steps that are involved and all of the things that you should know about installing Drush. When you're looking at the project page on drupal.org, there's a whole lot of information about the people who worked on it and what Drush is, and there's also a link to a whole site that's dedicated just to Drush information: drush.ws, and there's a link there. Let's go ahead and take a look at that. It takes you immediately to a list of all the Drush commands per version, but let's look at the About tab to get more of an overview. This just gives you a succinct list of the kinds of things that Drush can do for you. You can do project management as a Drupal project, downloading and enabling modules and themes. You can run cron and clear your cache on your site, and you can also run SQL commands directly onto your Drupal database from the command line. So let's actually look at some examples of this. I'm not going to walk through step-by-step because we'll be doing that in future videos, but just to give you an idea of what Drush can do and how it works. So this is my terminal. I'm at a command line. I'm also currently inside of a Drupal 7 installation, so I have a Drupal 7 site installed. If I do a Drush status on the site, you'll see I get a whole bunch of information about this site, so these are all the things that Drush knows about it. I can see the version of Drupal I'm running, 7.2. I can also see the version of Drush that I'm currently using. Probably one of the most common tasks that people use Drush for is to download new modules onto the Drupal site, so I'm going to download Views, Devel, and Pathauto modules, very common modules. By typing that command, Drush goes and gets the latest versions of the Drupal 7 modules for those. Now if I were to go into my site's modules directory, I would see that I have those modules downloaded and ready to use on my site just that quickly. So you see how much faster and easier that is than going to drupal.org, finding the modules, clicking the download, making sure I put them in the right directory. Drush handles all of that for me. So let's go back to the browser here, and let's go back to the Drush project page on drupal.org because there's one other aspect about Drush I just wanted to go over real quickly. Other modules can also add Drush commands. When you get Drush you have a basic set of commands, but then other modules can also add commands, and there's quite a number of modules that do this. Here we're looking at the drupal.org modules listing page of all the modules that are in the category of Drush. You can see there's some real handy stuff like Devel, Backup and Migrate, Views Bulk Operations. Create Module also has Drush commands, so you can do a lot of tasks directly from the command line rather than having to use a user interface all the time. This list goes on. You can scroll through and look at these and get to know them. In future videos, we'll also be talking about some of the more popular contributed modules that are integrated with Drush and how you can use those commands as well. I'm really excited about this series because Drush is a very powerful tool that let's you get things done very quickly, and it has rapidly become a standard tool in every Drupal site builder's kit. It's one worth knowing, even if you aren't very familiar with the command line or very comfortable with it. This series we're going to start off with showing how to install and set up Drush to begin with on your computer, and then we'll start out very slowly at the beginning, covering basic commands on how to do things like download and enable modules and run some basic Drush commands and get comfortable. Even if that's all you ever end up doing, you'll save yourself so much time by using Drush. It's a great tool, and I'm looking forward to the series, and I hope you are too. [Drupalize.Me - Learn Drupal]