The complexity of developing and maintaining multiple Drupal sites can grow like kudzu. Keeping on top of them is important not only for version control of your codebase but also for streamlining development to production site transitions. Until now we've just shown examples of how to drush it up nice with a single site- go to that site's directory, type drush, be happy. But when you have multiple sites on one or more servers that you need to interact with, Drush can help make your life easier.

Instead of writing scripts to 'cd' here, or 'cd' there to get into the right Drupal installation directory to perform a Drush task, you can create aliases for each site that work like nicknames. For example, we have a 'dev' and a 'prod' site on a server. Instead of changing back and forth between the directories to Drushify, we create aliases for them and can call them from anywhere.

First, create a new file in ~/.drush called <aliasname>.alias.drushrc.php and put this code in it:

<?php
$aliases['prod'] = array(
  'root' => '/var/www/vhosts/themechanism.com',
  'uri' => 'www.themechanism.com',
  );
?>

Now, from anywhere on the system, you can call Drush and perform commands on your site.

$ drush @prod status

You can set an alias for a remote site, copy files between prod and dev, sql-sync your database between sites, etc. etc.

Further Drush alias examples can be found in drush/examples/example.aliases.drushrc.php or wherever you installed drush.

 

The Drush de Jour brings you the latest and possibly greatest bits of drush wisdom we use for developing and maintaining our Drupal sites.