How to use Drush to download and install Drupal modules

Posted on November 9th, 2010 by Sacha Chua

One of the best things about building websites with Drupal is that there are thousands of modules that help you quickly create functionality.

To set things up, you need to download Drush and add it to your path. For example, you might unpack it into /opt/drush and then add the following line to your ~/.bashrc:

PATH=/opt/drush:$PATH
export PATH

Reload your ~/.bashrc with source ~/.bashrc, and the drush command should become available. If you’re on Microsoft Windows, it might need some more finagling. (Or you can just give up and use a virtual image of Linux to develop your Drupal websites. You’ll probably end up much happier. ;) )

Once you’ve installed Drush, what can you do with it?

Drush is a huge time-saver. For example, I install dozens of modules in the course of building a Drupal website. Instead of copying the download link, changing to my sites/all/modules directory, pasting the download URL into my terminal window after wget, unpacking the file, deleting the archive, and then clicking through the various module enablement screens, I can just issue the following commands to download and enable the module.

drush dl modulename
drush en -y modulename

(The -y option means say yes to all the prompts.)

So much faster and easier. You can use these commands with several modules (module1 module2 module3), and you can use drush cli to start a shell that’s optimized for Drush.

Drush is also useful if you’ve screwed up your Drupal installation and you need to disable themes or modules before things can work again. In the past, I’d go into the {system} table and carefully set the status of the offending row to 0. Now, that’s just a drush dis modulename.

Drush has a bucketload of other useful commands, and drush help is well worth browsing. Give it a try!

More posts about: drupal, geek, tips, work // 13 Comments »

Short URL: http://sachachua.com/blog/p/21853

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Davidis

Thanks Sacha for this nice Drush intro.
Is there a table somewhere with the modules list and their file names?
http://sachachua.com Sacha Chua

No, but Drupal and Drupal Modules list many modules. You can look at the URL for the module name when downloading it. For example, the Content Creation Kit is at http://drupal.org/project/cck, so use cck as the module name for downloading it. Some modules have submodules, so you can look in the module directory or search for all the *.info files to find out how to enable them from the command line. Hope that helps!
Mahnster

Um, for me anyway, it wasn’t

PATH=/opt/drush;$PATH
export $PATH

but was

PATH=/opt/drush;$PATH
export PATH

note there is no $ when doing an “export” on a variable.
http://sachachua.com Sacha Chua

Oops! Thanks for catching that. Fixing!
Lu

Can’t believe i lived for so long without using Drush…sniff. Thanks for sharing.
http://floatsolutions.com/ Aidan McQuay

We need a drush emacs major mode ;)
Hanmant A Sapkal

This is good man. Thanks for sharing drush uses
drupaler

Hi, thanks so much. Your’s was the first tutorial that got drush working on my mac! It’s sooooo much quicker to set up drupal now.

many thanks.
Dave

Good tut, just one question. How do I do this:
“To set things up, you need to download Drush and add it to your path. For example, you might unpack it into /opt/drush”
http://sachachua.com Sacha Chua

Dave: Oooh, Drush now has even easier installation instructions. See the Drush project page.
John

Great stuff. Thanks. I’m a Drupal7 newbie but Drush looks promising since I’ll be needing to automate tons of stuff on the development process.
http://www.facebook.com/fred.smith.5473894 Fred Smith

I’ve been using Drupal for years and always did it via the GUI. I had problems updating to metatags beta 3 which is the first time I heard about drush as a way to get around it. The pear install simplifies the install of drush even further since it adds the path automatically.

Will have to spend some time learning how to use it.

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