Question

I'm aware that Drush is a powerful command-line tool for managing a Drupal site. What uses have you gotten from it that go beyond what you can do in the Drupal interface?

Answer 1

This is a good question because some people question how much more effective drush can make you, and the answer is, "ninja works it".

We needed to delete all nodes of a certain content type. No, you can't just go into MySQL command line and run "delete from node;" and expect good things to happen. So we wrote a quick plugin to drush and bam

    $ drush node-deletebytype article
    >63 nodes deleted

Can you imagine if you had do selects on the checkboxes in the admin interface for that? What if you had 6000 nodes (as we often did when importing lots of content). If you don't want to write your own plugin, the Delete All ^[1] 6.x-dev version has drush integration, and there is a patch available for D7.

But wait, that's not all, you also get the great combination of using drush and piping the output to other commands like grep. Let's say I have a big development site testing out lots of new features and I can't remember all the facebook modules I'm trying out, well drush to the rescue:

    $ drush pm-list | grep -i facebook
     Drupal for Facebook - contrib  Register Users (fb_register.module) (fb_register)              Module  Not installed  6.x-3.0-rc3     
     Drupal for Facebook - contrib  Rules Integration (fb_rules.module) (fb_rules)                 Module  Not installed  6.x-3.0-rc3     
     Facebook connect               Fbconnect Events (fbconnect_events)                            Module  Disabled                       
     Facebook Social                Facebook Friends Invite (fbconnect_invite)                     Module  Not installed  6.x-2.0-beta1

But wait, that's not all, it slices [out your sql queries for text usage]

drush sql-query "select * from users;" > userlist.txt

It dices out those bad seeds [of code that give you a white screen of death and thus prevent you from disabling via the admin interface]

drush dis that_custom_module_with_mo_code_mo_probs

But wait! It juliennes [those files and dbs and sends them to prod] too!

drush rsync demosite.drupal6.local @peer
drush sql-sync demosite.drupal6.local @peer

And oh my, I just learned it can work on remote sites using aliases such as the above so we can turn

drush username@myserver.com/path/to/drupal#mysite.com status

into

drush @dev status

Drush (as seen on Drupal.org), it's better than sliced bread. Get yours today!

[1] http://drupal.org/project/delete_all

Answer 2

I use Drush to manage automated importing and migration of data on a daily basis for archstl.org. I have a shell script that uses Drush to delete a set of migrated nodes, then reimport the nodes.

I also use Drush to run cron on some of my sites, and to clear caches. (Running drush commands from crontab is better, in many ways, then running wget on example.com/cron.php). Drush in combination with Drupal Queue, Elysia Cron, and a few other helpful modules == performance and optimization WIN!

One of the easiest and most helpful uses of drush is to perform updates of your site, clear caches, etc.

Have a read through http://drush.ws/ and see if you can find some cool commands to help your life easier.