Usage

Getting Started

Drush Rebuild uses Drush Aliases to get things done. Don’t know what Drush alias is? Read drush docs-aliases and come back to this page. It’s just a shortcut for pointing to a site. It lets us conveniently run commands like drush @example.prod core-status to get status info from production site.

Let’s consider a Drupal site with the following Drush alias file defined in ~/.drush/example.aliases.drushrc.php:

$aliases['local'] = array(
  'root' => '/home/kosta/sites/example/live-docs',
  'uri' => 'http://local.example.com',
);

$aliases['stage'] = array(
  'uri' => 'http://stage.example.com',
  'root' => '/var/www/html/example.com/live-docs',
  'remote-host' => 'stage.example.com',
  'remote-user' => 'kosta',
);

$aliases['prod'] = array(
  'uri' => 'http://www.example.com',
  'root' => '/var/www/html/example.com/live-docs',
  'remote-host' => 'example.com',
  'remote-user' => 'kosta',
);

Pretty straightforward. Now, we want to rebuild our local environment based on the latest DB in production.

The traditional way might involve runninng mysqldump in production and downloading that, then importing via mysql. Or, more advanced users might do something like drush sql-sync @example.prod @example.local – but wait, we also have to change some variables, and enable reroute_email, etc. By the time you’re done, you might have run a dozen or two commands.

Now try repeating the process or asking your colleague to do so. Or wait a couple months and come back to the project, and try to remember the steps you took. We need a way to simplify this process and make it repeatable. That’s where Drush Rebuild comes in.

Configuring your aliases

As mentioned at the beginning, Drush Rebuild hooks into your existing aliases. So let’s look at our local alias again:

$aliases['local'] = array(
  'root' => '/home/kosta/sites/example/live-docs',
  'uri' => 'http://local.example.com',
);

We’re going to make a very simple change to this alias:

$aliases['local'] = array(
  'root' => '/home/kosta/sites/example/live-docs',
  'uri' => 'http://local.example.com',
  'path-aliases' => array(
    '%rebuild' => '/home/kosta/sites/example/resources/rebuild.yaml',
  ),
);

What we are doing is telling Drush Rebuild that a configuration file exists at examples/resources/rebuild.yaml.

Writing the configuration file

Commands