Drush and the Drupal Console are both command line tools that allow you to greatly speed up administration and development tasks for Drupal websites. After installing these tools, you will be able to perform actions simply by typing commands into a terminal window—actions that would usually take multiple steps using a web browser, or perhaps might ordinarily require that you write some code. Drupal Console only works with Drupal 8, whereas Drush runs on Drupal 6, 7 and 8. If you are starting to work with Drupal 8, then you should use both!
Drush & Drupal Console Capabilities
What can you do with these tools? A brief, partial list of capabilities is shown below:
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Drush Features
Drupal Console Features
Intrigued, and ready to get started? The first step is to open up a terminal window. Linux users should be no stranger to the command line, but if you use MacOS or Windows, you might not have used this very much. See the table below for instructions on how to do this for your platform.
Linux |
MacOS | Windows | ||
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Click on the Unity icon and type “terminal”. Double-click on the Terminal icon. |
Click on the “LaunchPad” and type “terminal” into the search field. Double-click on the Terminal icon. |
Press the START (Windows) key and type “git bash”. Select the Git bash icon shown above to launch the terminal. |
The terminal is pre-installed on Linux and MacOS, but you will probably need to install it if you are using Windows. If you do not see the “Git Bash” item shown above on your system, download and install the Git for Windows package from Google. This is the best terminal available for that platform; other options such as PowerShell and the built-in “Run Programs” terminal (the DOS shell) work differently, and are likely to cause problems.
Once you have your terminal window open, you will need to become familiar with a few shell commands. If you are new to the command line, try ls to list the files in the current directory, cd to change directory, and pwd to show which directory you are currently in (print working directory). Reading a tutorial on the shell, such as An introduction to Bash, by Ray Toal, will help you get started. The command line might feel awkward at first, but as you get used to it, it will really help to speed up your tasks.
[Related] Applying Updates to Drupal Core on Patheon with Drush
Working with Drush and the Drupal Console
(This assumes that you have already installed enough additional packages to do local Drupal development; if you have not already installed sqlite, you might want to install it first.) Drush and Drupal Console are very similar, but they are packaged separately, and will need to be individually installed. You should follow the online instructions to install Drush with Composer, and then go on to install Drupal Console.
Next, check and see if they installed correctly. In the examples that follow, type the green text (drush version and drupal --version) into your terminal window, and confirm that you see output similar to what is shown below. The version numbers might be slightly different on your system.
| Drush | Drupal Console |
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| $ drush version Drush Version : 8.0-dev |
$ drupal --version Drupal Console version 0.9.1 |
Now, let’s show the power of Drush and the Drupal Console working together! First, we will use Drush to download, install and run Drupal 8, using pm-download (dl) and quick-drupal (qd) commands:
| Install and Run Drupal with Drush |
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$ drush dl drupal-8.0.x $ cd drupal-8.0.x |
After the output above has printed out, there should be a brief pause, and then you should see your web browser launch, and open a page displaying the Drupal site that you just installed. That was fast and easy!
Next, we’ll use Drupal Console to create a Drupal 8 module for us. Press CONTROL-C in your terminal window, to stop the web server. Then, run the commands shown in the example below:
| Create a module with Drupal Console |
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$ drupal generate:module Welcome to the Drupal module generator Enter the new module name: hello Generated or updated files Site path: …/drupal-8.0.x-dev |
Did you think you knew how to write a Drupal 8 module? Whether or not you thought you did, with the help of Drupal Console, you just wrote one. That’s pretty cool, but the module is missing its controller. A Drupal 8 module without a controller is like a Drupal 7 module without a hook_menu, so let’s go ahead and add one, so our module will do something. We’ll use Drupal Console again to do this:
| Add a controller to our module with Drupal Console |
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$ drupal generate:controller Welcome to the Drupal Controller generator Enter the module name: hello Generated or updated files Site path: …/drupal-8.0.x-dev [+] Rebuilding routes, wait a moment please |
So far so good. What did that generate for us?
| Show the files generated by Drupal Console using the Tree command |
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| $ tree modules/custom/ modules/custom/ └── hello ├── Tests │ └── Controller │ └── HelloControllerTest.php ├── composer.json ├── hello.info.yml ├── hello.module ├── hello.routing.yml └── src └── Controller └── HelloController.php |
Open up the file HelloController.php in your favorite editor, and replace the provided implementation with the green text shown below:
| Modify the generated code to provide our own message |
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| class HelloController extends ControllerBase { /** * Greet. * * @return string * Return Hello string. */ public function greet($world) { return [ '#type' => 'markup', '#markup' => $this->t('Hello, @world!', array('@world' => $world)) ]; } } |
That looks like a proper “Hello World” program, so let’s try it out. First, though, we must enable the module. We can do this with Drush as well:
| Enable the “hello” module with Drush |
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| $ drush en hello The following extensions will be enabled: hello Do you really want to continue? (y/n): y hello was enabled successfully. |
We stopped the webserver above in order to run Drupal Console, so let’s fire it up again, this time using the runserver (rs) command. This will log you in again, and open up a new web browser pane to the page you specify on the command line:
| Start up the webserver with Drush |
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| $ drush rs /hello/greet/world HTTP server listening on localhost, port 8383 (see http://localhost:8383/hello/greet/world), serving site localhost:8383, logged in as admin... PHP 5.6.12 Development Server started at Thu Sep 24 22:29:24 2015 Listening on http://localhost:8383 Document root is …/drupal-8.0.x-dev Press Ctrl-C to quit. |
This should display the page you created in your new module in your web browser. Success! This Drupal 8 stuff isn’t so hard after all, when using the right tools.
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