It doesn't work in the root directory

Question

I'm trying to get Drush to work in a shared environment where I have limited SSH access. I've managed to install Composer and Drush. In PuTTY I can use Drush outside of my Drupal root folder, ie. /var/www/domain.com

Here I can successfully execute: vendor/bin/drush help and get the help output in return.

However, if I move (in PuTTY) to my web root folder where my Drupal installation is located: /var/www/domain.com/public_html and try to execute ../vendor/bin/drush help I get the following message: : No such file or directory

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Ideally, you should be able to just run drush help by itself without having to specify a path to it. If you can't do that, then maybe your environment isn't getting paths set correctly. Something missing from .bashrc or .profile maybe?

If paths / environment is a problem, I'd try using the phar version of drush - it's a self contained single file, and might work better. You can just download it and run it from anywhere. There's nothing to install:

cd ~
wget https://github.com/drush-ops/drush/releases/download/8.1.11/drush.phar
chmod +x drush.phar
cd /var/www/sasclan.org/public_html
~/drush.phar help

Answer 2

I had the same problem and using Drush Launcher helped me.

A small wrapper around Drush for your global $PATH.

WHY?

In order to avoid dependency issues, it is best to require Drush on a per-project basis via Composer (composer require drush/drush). This makes Drush available to your project by placing it at vendor/bin/drush.

However, it is inconvenient to type vendor/bin/drush in order to execute Drush commands. By installing the Drush Launcher globally on your local machine, you can simply type drush on the command line, and the launcher will find and execute the project specific version of Drush located in your project's vendor directory.