In my previous blog post, I wrote about shell aliases that make Drupal administration easier. Another tool that makes Drupal administration easier is Drush.

Drush, which alludes to Drupal shell, gives Drupal a command-line interface (CLI) that takes a command and execute it. It makes otherwise tedious tasks almost trivial. For instance, updating modules, themes and translations can be done in one sweep with the command drush update.

With 27 built-in commands, following can be accomplished direct from the command line:

• Get a birds-eye view of the current Drupal installation.
• Download, install, enable, update, disable or uninstall modules, themes, profiles and translations.
• Rsync the Drupal tree to/from another server using ssh.
• Run all cron hooks.
• Clear all caches.
• Show/delete watchdog log messages.
• Run simpletest and mail the results.
• Evaluate arbitrary PHP code after bootstrapping Drupal.
• Managing Drupal database.

More functions are on way or can be added by other modules extending Drush.

In blog posts to follow, I will show how to install Drush and use it to setup and maintain a Drupal site. Meanwhile, you must see the hilarious, yet instructive, video Drush: More Beer, Less Effort by Development Seed.

To summarize, Drush is a must-have tool for serious Drupal developers and Drupal maintainers; yet it is one of the best kept secrets in the Drupal community.