The majority of us here at Raincity Studios run MAMP when working locally on projects or for a testing environment. Being introduced to the awesomeness that is Drush yesternight, I went to giver' a try on my local machine.

What is Drush you say?

Drush allows you to easily manage, update, and maintain your modules via command line without having the need to keep a CVS cheat sheet laying around.

In this walkthrough, we'll go through the process of getting Drush working on your local machine, assuming you are running MAMP.

Getting Started

You'll need both a working MAMP installation as well as the Drush project from drupal.org.

The Problem

Following the instruction provided to me from the Drush tarball, I encountered a problem when trying to execute the drush.php file. Upon execution, it returned the full html structure as if I were trying to view it through a browser. This is because you will need to have PHP compiled with CLI-mode (command line interface) enabled. This allows PHP files to be executed via command line, and this CLI mode is only one of the SAPI (System API) types available. For more information on SAPI types, visit PHP.net.

Using MAMP's supplied PHP

Taking a look at the drush.php file located in the sites/all/modules/drush/ folder, I could see that the file was calling upon the php bash command which happens to be pointing at the system's PHP compilation rather than MAMP's.

Firstly, change the php bash command to link to MAMP's PHP:

The -f flag unlinks the current target file, if it exists, and links it again with the provided path.

Second, create a link to drush.php in a directory that is in your $PATH, e.g. (this is a step that is inside the README.txt that comes along with the drush tarball):

In my case it was:

Lastly, initialize drush by moseying over to your Drupal root directory, in my case this was:

Additional Features

There are additional features for drush such as the ability to install and update your modules from the command line using CVS, wget, or curl. Additional modules are dependent or suggested in addition to enabling these features. The Update Status module, which checks with drupal.org once a day to see if there are new officially released versions of Drupal and any modules that you are running, and the CVS Deploy, which helps sites that are deployed directly from a CVS workspace. Out of the box, Update status does not know the status of any module that was not installed via a tarball produced by drupal.org, which is why we use CVS deploy.

One final example is the provisioning module, which is a set of extensions to drush that deal with entire sites and install profiles. The provisioning module is the back end interface for our hostmaster mass hosting install profile. A simple example is provided directly on the provisioning project page, showing how you can install an entire new site, based on an install profile:

The provisioning framework, like drush, is also extensible, so backups, upgrades, and rollbacks will also eventually be handled using this same method. You can also just use the provisioning framework along with drush to help automate your workflow, and not use the rest of the hostmaster framework.