Drush, the command line for Drupal

Drush is a command line shell and Unix scripting interface for Drupal. This tool will help you quite a lot when building a Drupal website, saving a lot of time with repetitives or time consuming tasks. If you don't like command line, you can forget Drush...

The main interest will be the time consuming compared to the graphical environment of your site. The gain is not phenomenal but during maintenance or construction of a website you will quickly get its interest. If you are ready to learn, the Drush Scripting allows you to automate tasks on your site and in your environments (staging, pre-prod, prod ...).

Drush under *nix

Many distributions have a drush package, it will not be the latest version but installation is quite easy:

Debian

sudo apt-get install drush

CentOS

sudo yum install drush

OS X

brew install drush

Drush under Windows

http://www.drush.org/drush_windows_installer

You should have Git for Windows on your system to get a working unix shell.

https://git-scm.com/download/win

First step with Drush

Under linux you now have access to the drush command. Without arguments, it will just list all available commands.

Basic drush commands (with useful options!)

You must be in your Drupal website root directory (/var/www/drupal, or EasyPHP\data\localweb\projects...)

First get a status

drush status

Download a module or a theme

drush dl PROJECT_NAME OTHER_PROJECT ...

Whitout arguments it will download last Drupal release:

drush dl

Enable a module (-y argument avoid prompt and download the module if it is not in your installation)

drush -y en PROJECT_NAME OTHER_PROJECT ...

Disable a module (-y argument avoid prompt)

drush -y dis PROJECT_NAME OTHER_PROJECT ...

Get the main user one time login link if you lost the password (very useful!)

drush uli

Flush all caches

drush -y cc all

Flush theme cache (for templates overrides)

drush -y cc theme-registry

Flush menu cache (if you write a new HOOK_menu or alter one)

drush -y cc menu

With css / js aggregation, flush this caches for a little modification

drush -y cc css-js

Launch cron, -v argument will give you more informations, very useful when a cron is stuck and you don't know why!

drush -v cron

Get all the module enabled

drush pml --status=enabled

With module Backup & Migrate, you can get a database dump

drush bb

With Feature module, see all features

drush fl

Only enabled features

drush fl --status=enabled

With Feature and Diff, see feature overrides

drush fd NAME_FEATURE

Update a feature with current values

drush -y fu NAME_FEATURE

Revert a feature to get back to code values

drush -y fr NAME_FEATURE

With Devel module, fully reinstall a module (disable, uninstal and enable)

drush dre NAME_MODULE

There is a lot more, but these are those I use the most, of course a good way to handle this is to create your own aliases!