I use Dreamhost for some of my personal sites and for some friends. Dreamhost's basic package is nothing too powerful, but I like them; they are cheap, responsive, responsible, green, and funny. I also love some Drush. But for the life of me, the newer versions of Drush were throwing weird errors, mostly involving syntax. But when I went into the code, I could not find any syntax errors. Some of the errors suggested I was using PHP4, but I was like "No, I am definitely using PHP5 with Dreamhost."

Apparently, I was wrong! Looking through the issue queue of Drush today, I came across this comment which explains how to manually use PHP5 for the Drush alias, and it occured to me that my host could be doing that. Searching the interwebs a little, this was the best documentation on Dreamhost's setup that I could find. Apparently, Dreamhost uses PHP4 for the command line by default.

So, I changed by alias definition in my .bash_profile file to:

And voila! Drush is working!!! Thanks to ericrdb and the wonderful developers of Drush.

Drush is wonderful. I discovered it about six to nine months ago and can't even fathom the amount of time it has saved me. Thank you, Drush, more specifically the wonderful developers on the project.

Drush Basics

If you are not in the know, and it's okay if you are not, Drush is a command line application for Drupal. Drush by itself is more of a framework, and becomes much more powerful and useful in conjunction with Drush Extras. Once you have set things up, you can do something like:

This would install (cvs checkout to sites/all/modules) the CCK, Views, and ImageCache modules. You would still have to go to the web administration to enable the modules. But, how easy is that! I am starting to put put together Drush install profiles, instead of using Drupal's install profiles.