Having discussed this issue with the innovations team at Symetris, I decided to write an open-source tool named Drall which would make it easier to run Drush commands on multi-site Drupal installations.
Drall: A Great Contribution to the Drupal Community
Before deciding to build Drall, I looked for the existence of other similar utilities. However, I couldn’t find a standard, reusable solution. Many developers have tried addressing this issue by writing custom scripts, but such scripts often differ from project to project and from developer to developer. Thus, I felt that a standard, reusable tool like Drall could help the Drupal community.
How to Install Drall?
Drall can easily be installed with Composer just like several other PHP tools.
composer require jigarius/drall;
2 Ways of Using Drall?
Now that Drall is installed, here are the two common ways of using it. There are other not-so-commonly-used commands in Drall, but they’ve been omitted from this article to keep things simple. You can read about them on the Drall’s GitHub repository.
1- Exec:drush (exd)
This is the big command that Drall brings to the table. It allows you to run the same drush command on all or multiple websites.
drall exec:drush core:rebuild
# Equivalent to drall exec:drush --uri=@@uri core:rebuild
This executes the drush core:rebuild command on all sites defined in the project’s sites.php file.
Site aliases
If you have site aliases defined in your site, you can use the @@site placeholder to run commands on multiple sites. For example,
drall exec:drush @@site.dev core:rebuild
2- Exec:shell (exs)
The exec:drush command allows you to run a single Drush command. What if you wanted to run multiple commands or run non-drush commands? To solve this problem, the exec:shell command was introduced in Drall 2.x.
Here’s how you can run multiple drush commands with drall exec:shell.
drall exec:shell “drush –uri=@@uri config:import -y && drush –uri=@@uri core:rebuild;”
Cool, isn’t it? Note how multiple commands were wrapped in double quotes. With shell:exec you can also run non-drush commands.
drall exec:shell cat web/sites/@@uri/settings.local.php
Conclusion
Drall makes it easier to run drush as well as non-drush commands on all or multiple sites in a multi-site Drupal installation. Also, it is easy to install and update, thanks to Composer. That said, there are some very cool features in Drall’s pipeline, so don’t forget to star/follow the Drall repository on GitHub. Don’t forget about Drall while working on your next multi-site Drupal installation!
I hereby thank Symetris for sponsoring the initial development of Drall.
