Installing Drush

• 29 March 2014
• hosting,
• csoft,
• BSD,
• drupal,
• drush

Installing Drush on OS X #

Installing Drush on OS X is fairly straight forward. I'm writing this from memory but I think it went a little like this...

• Prerequisites: Install XCode and command line tools from the App Store. Install homebrew.

• Install Composer globally (via. homebrew).

brew update
brew tap homebrew/dupes
brew tap homebrew/php
brew install composer

• Install Drush 6.x (stable at time of writing).

composer global require drush/drush:6.*

• Test it

drush --version

Installing Drush on Csoft.net #

I've been hosting various sites at csoft.net since about 2000 and using Drupal on there since around 2004 (version 4.5 I think). If you're comfortable on the command line (BSD) they help you look after yourself. They're solid.

The install of Drush on Csoft shared hosting is a little more involved than on OS X. Both Composer and Drush require command line PHP rather than the Csoft default of fast CGI. This can be found at /usr/local/php-[version]/bin/php and must be specified explicitly. Make sure to use a version of PHP with openssl to avoid the following error.

Some settings on your machine make Composer unable to work properly.
Make sure that you fix the issues listed below and run this script again:

The openssl extension is missing, which means that secure HTTPS transfers are impossible.
If possible you should enable it or recompile php with --with-openssl

• Install Composer locally and set up an alias to ensure it runs using the correct php.

curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | /usr/local/php53-fat/bin/php -- --install-dir=bin
alias composer='/usr/local/php53-fat/bin/php ~/bin/composer.phar'

• Use Composer to install Drush.

composer global require drush/drush:6.*

• Add the following aliases to your .bash_profile. The drush alias uses the currently recommended way of running under a particular version of PHP by setting the DRUSH_PHP environment variable and calling the drush shell script.

alias composer='/usr/local/php53-fat/bin/php ~/bin/composer.phar'
alias drush='DRUSH_PHP=/usr/local/php53-fat/bin/php ~/.composer/vendor/drush/drush/drush'

• Reset the environment and test your new drush install

. ~/.bash_profile
drush --version

Updating Drush #

To update to a newer version in the future:

composer self-update
composer global update

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