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:

# Drush

#-----------------------------------------------#

alias drush='/usr/local/php5/bin/php /home/alanpalazzolo/.drush/drush/drush.php'

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