Drush, short for Drupal shell, is a command-line shell and scripting interface for Drupal. Using Drush, developers can manage and maintain their Drupal websites from the server command line.

Drush makes website development easier by bypassing all of web services, allowing you to make direct updates to the code and database. It can even directly download and install software and modules for you, so that you don't have to do it yourself.

Drush has developed alongside Drupal, and there are several different available versions of Drush, just as there are versions of Drupal. 

Visit drush.org to verify Drupal version compatibility.

Seeing the power of Drush¶

As an example of the power of Drush, let's say that you want to use Views with your Drupal 7 website. If you were doing this manually, you'd download the Views module from drupal.org (be sure to also download the Chaos tool suite module, as it's required by Views) making sure that you extract the files in the correct directory, sign in to the website, and then go to the Modules page to enable the modules.

With Drush, you simply have to execute the following command from a command-line prompt to make Views available on your website:

drush dl en views

As it enables the Views module, Drush determines that Views requires the Chaos Tools Suite module, so it downloads and enables that module as well.

Installing Drush¶

If your website's hosting environment already includes Drush, it's ready for your use.

Note for Acquia product users

Acquia Cloud Next, Acquia Cloud Enterprise, and Acquia Cloud Professional include the most current and stable release of Drush. For more information, see About Drush on Acquia Cloud.

For those environments that do not yet have Drush, you'll need to download it from its GitHub. 

Note: Drush requires that your Drupal site be built with Composer and Drush be listed as a dependency.

Additional Drush resources¶

Drush resources in the Acquia Product Documentation and Knowledge Base¶

The Acquia Help Center contains several documentation pages and articles that use Drush for website maintenance, including the following pages:

• Using Drush aliases Cloud documentation 
• Using Drush to apply security updates Knowledge base article
• Drush Cloud reference Cloud documentation

External Drush resources¶

• Drush website
• A Beginner's Guide To Drush: The Drupal Shell from DigitalOcean
• Drush Commands - Drush command reference page
• Drush for Beginners from CMS Philly