Chapter 1, Installation and Basic Usage, starts with a couple of jaw-dropping examples, followed by an introduction to Drush, and then focuses on installation, usage, and some basic concepts.

Chapter 2, Executing Drush Commands, shows how common site-building and administration tasks in Drupal projects can be performed faster and easier using Drush commands, right after it has been installed. In order to demonstrate this, a sample Drupal project will be installed, configured, extended, monitored, and tested using Drush commands.

Chapter 3, Customizing Drush, dives into advanced topics such as writing and altering commands, executing scripts, working with site aliases and configuration files, and customizing our terminal.

Chapter 4, Extending Drush, expands the Drush toolkit by installing and testing contributed modules which implement new Drush commands.

To run the examples in the book, the following software will be required:

Drupal developers or themers who have already built a few Drupal sites and understand its web-based administration.

If you have not ever touched a terminal, this book is progressively paced starting with the structure of a command, and finishing with how to simplify complex commands that interact with remote servers. However, you should learn the basic terminal commands in order to move around, copy and manage directories, connect and interact with a database, log in to remote systems, and have basic PHP programming skills.

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text are shown as follows: "Let's start with a very simple command such as core-status, which prints configuration information about Drush."

A block of code is set as follows:

/**
* Implementation of hook_drush_help_alter()
* Adds an option "enable" to pm-download command.
*/
function autoenable_drush_help_alter(&$command) {
if ($command['command'] == 'pm-download') {
$command['options']['enable'] = "Enable the module automatically.";
}
}

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

/**
* Implementation of hook_drush_help_alter()
* Adds an option "enable" to pm-download command.
*/
function autoenable_drush_help_alter(&$command) {

if ($command['command'] == 'pm-download') {
$command['options']['enable'] = "Enable the module automatically.";
}
}

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

$ drush user-blocker --since="1970" en
Blocked 0 users [success]

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a command-line input or output, the relevant lines or items are set in italics:

$ drush user-blocker --since="1970" en

Long commands that expand on more than one line have a backslash (\) at the end of each line, so they can be copied and pasted on a terminal. Windows users should replace these backslashes by carets (^). Here is an example:

$ drush site-install \
--db-url=mysql://username:password@localhost/festival \
--site-name=Festival \
standard

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Open the Command Line Interface at Start | Programs | Accessories | Command Prompt".

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