Beginning Drupal 8

Chapter 15
Using Drush
This chapter provides a basic overview of Drush, a command-line tool that greatly simplifies the tasks of
building and administering a Drupal 8 website. With Drush, tasks that often require logging onto your
site, navigating to a site administration page, and filling out a form can now be performed with a simple
command-line interface. Drush also enables you to administer one or several sites remotely, without having
to log onto each server and each site to perform routine maintenance tasks. Drush handles most of the
tasks associated with managing modules, themes, and user profiles and common administrative tasks like
running cron, creating backups, and clearing caches. You can even execute SQL command from Drush.
Installing Drush
Drush is at its core a set of shell scripts (Unix/Linux) or bat scripts (Windows), combined with PHP scripts
that handle most of the common tasks of administering a Drupal site. Installing the scripts and PHP is a
relatively straightforward process on both Unix/Linux and Windows.
Installing Drush on Unix, Linux, or OS X
To install Drush on Unix, Linux, or OS X, follow these steps:
1. Download Drush from https://github.com/drush-ops/drush. In the right
column of the Drush landing page on GitHub, you will see a Download ZIP
button. If you are familiar with Git (see Chapter 16), you may wish to clone the
Git repository so that updates to Drush are easier to manage. For information on
cloning repositories, see Chapter 16.
2. Place the uncompressed drush.zip file in a directory that is outside of your web
root. On most web servers, the webroot will be something like public_html or
www_root or docroot. Review your web server’s documentation for details on
where the web root directory resides. For security purposes, you don’t want to
place it in your web root, as it would then be available and executable by anyone.
3. Make the drush command executable:
$ chmod u+x /path/to/drush/drush
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