Drush

While working on a site audit, I wanted to be able to see what errors were currently happening on the site. I checked and they had dblog enabled already with a few days of errors, but going to admin/reports/dblog showed me pages full of the same error. This can happen when there is an error that occurs on a popular page or happens on every page load and it makes the logs difficult to read. In addition to that, the overview page truncates the error message and so you need to click through to the detail page to see the entire thing.

Have you ever wished you could just type one command and load up all of the things you need to work on for a project? Wouldn’t it be nice to have your terminal set up with the correct Drush alias, tailing the watchdog, with access to your servers just a couple keystrokes away? Sounds nice, right?

Have you noticed how your remote drush aliases (e.g., @my-dev-server) don't work when you're logged into the remote server? It's because aliases with the "remote-host" key specified can't work locally. Quite annoying!

The Drush system is a tremendous productivity booster for those who learn to use it, it can be used for simplifying module updates, to upgrading from Drupal 6 to 7, to juggling Features. Furthermore, its potential is near limitless once a relatively simple set of hooks is learned. My focus today, however, is on a rather rudimentary problem - exporting & re-importing databases, a task that is typically used to make a copy of a production database in order to run it locally.

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A drush site alias file allows you to streamline advanced drush commands and make running them against both local and remote sites a breeze. With a properly configured alias file and an SSH key you can run frequently used commands that have complex options, with a concise easily remembered "alias" on any site. This will help you be far more productive and you will find yourself using drush itself far more often.

When working on multiple sites and multiple instances of a site more than once, you’ll need to give yourself administrative permissions to the Drupal interface. Rather than tracking down someone who has rights to the site and have them give you permissions why not just use Drush? Drush makes adding users and giving users specific roles such as administration extremely simple.