Drush status info and available commands

Displaying your Drush version

As with most command-line tools, you can use Drush with the --version option to see which version you have installed:

sarah@demo-web: /var/www/html$ drush --version
Drush Commandline Tool 12.4.3.0

Listing all available Drush commands

Which Drush commands you have available depends on which version of Drush you are using and which additional Drupal modules (that provide Drush commands) are installed.

You can list all available commands, grouped by topic / namespace, by running drush list. However, since list is the default command when no other command is specified, you can also leave it out and just run drush. Both have the same result:

sarah@demo-web: /var/www/html$ drush list

or

sarah@demo-web: /var/www/html$ drush

→ Partial output of the drush list command.

All the available Drush commands are grouped by namespace, and show:

• The full command name (e.g. cache:rebuild).
• The command alias(es) if available (e.g. rebuild and cr).
• A short Description.

Listing commands by namespace

Use drush --filter=[namespace] to show only the commands for the given namespace.

Example

drush --filter=cache

Displaying more information about a command

Use drush help [command] to see a command's full description and available options.

Example 1

drush help cache:rebuild

Example 2

drush help user:login

Displaying Drush output in different formats

Human-readable vs Machine-readable

By default Drush displays information in a human-readable format.

While easy to read for humans, this unstructured format makes it hard to use in automation scripts where you may want to retrieve certain bits of information and act upon them.

For instance, you might want to write a script that:

• lists all views
• checks if a certain view is present
  • If present but disabled: enable it.
  • If not present: require a specific module with composer, install it with drush, and enable the view.

Without having access to the list of views in a structured format, you would have to perform messy text search operations to find the information you're looking for.

If the output is in a structured format, it becomes much less complex to automate the retrieval of the information you need.

However, machine-readable output is not always human-readable, and that's OK because it's meant to be consumed and processed by machines (scripts, custom Drupal modules, deployment systems, ...) instead of humans.

Consider, for instance, how the output for drush --format=json is not ideal for human consumption:

Available formats

The most common machine-readable formats are: 

• JSON (Wikipedia)
• YAML (Wikipedia)
• CSV (Wikipedia)
• XML (Wikipedia)

Apart from the default human-readable format and the JSON format, the available output formats vary for each command.

Use drush help [command] to find out which types of output the command supports.

Example: Show available output types

drush help views:list

Example: list all Views (default output)

drush views:list

Example: list all Views (JSON output)

drush views:list --format=json

Example: list all Views (CSV output)

drush views:list --format=csv

Example: list all Views (XML output)

drush views:list --format=xml