Developers Installation of Drush

Drush is powerful command line interface to Drupal. It comes with a set of pre-built commands to manage Drupal installations from command line shell. Especially, you will find it very useful while performing tasks that do frequently like clearing cache, running cron, setting and getting of system variables etc. It is a must have tool for Drupal developers. Drush is also highly extensible. You can develop commands specific to your project or system wide.

This article will show how to install Drush for system wide usage, allowing all users of in system to run Drush commands. Because of the same advantage, you would need root access to complete the steps below. It is assumed that stand Unix-like OS is being used.

Install Composer

Drush depend on numerous packages on Composer. So Composer is required to install. Check if you have Composer already install by typing composer -V in your shell. Otherwise, install composer globally using following commands below:

curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php
sudo mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer

Install Drush

Now you can move with manual installation of Drush. First, change to directory /usr/local.

cd /usr/local

Clone Drush's git repository and change to Drush root directory.

sudo git clone https://github.com/drush-ops/drush.git
cd drush

Make drush script executable for all.

sudo chmod +x drush

Create a symlink for the drush script to make it available in PATH always.

sudo ln -s /usr/local/drush/drush /usr/local/bin/drush

Now install Composer dependencies for Drush.

sudo composer install

Drush is ready to use! Just logout and login back. You can use drush command anywhere in the system.