Drush 8.1.2 is not working on Windows

Question

I have installed Drush 8.1.2 on Windows 7, but it doesn't work. Few command are working, but few are not working.

• drush uli 1 works
• drush dl <project name> works
• drush en <project name> doesn't work
• drush cc all doesn't work

Running drush en "module name", I get the following:

Command pm-enable needs a higher bootstrap level to run - you will need to invoke drush from a more functional Drupal environment to run this command. The drush command 'en fieldupdate' could not be executed.
Drush was not able to start (bootstrap) the Drupal database.
Hint: This may occur when Drush is trying to:

• bootstrap a site that has not been installed or does not have a configured database. In this case you can select another site with a working database setup by specifying the URI to use with the --uri parameter on the command line. See drush topic docs-aliases for details.

• connect the database through a socket. The socket file may be wrong or the php-cli may have no access to it in a jailed shell. See http://drupal.org/node/1428638 for details.

  Drush was attempting to connect to:
  Drupal version : 7.34
  Site URI : http://default
  Database driver : mysql
  Database hostname : localhost
  Database port :
  Database username : root
  Database name : staticpages
  PHP configuration : C:\xampp\php\php.ini
  PHP OS : WINNT
  Drush script : C:\Users\ins237\AppData\Roaming\Composer \vendor\drush\drush\drush
  Drush version : 8.1.2
  Drush temp directory : C:/Users/ins237/AppData/Local/Temp
  Drush configuration :
  Drush alias files :
  Drupal root : C:\xampp\htdocs\cms-staticpages
  Drupal Settings File : sites/default/settings.php
  Site path : sites/default

Answer 1

Looks like your database cannot be contaced, run drush status to make sure of that. If that's the issue, then you should update your settings.php files with the correct ip, I guess 127.0.0.1 for your xampp stack.

Not an answer to your question, but running PHP/Drupal on Windows is just asking for problems. You should look into Vagrant or Docker to run your Drupal sites on Windows, that will save you a lot of pain in the long run AND will make it easier to deploy your sites later on.

Answer 2

You should take a look at the **Drupal Console project.*

Drupal Console is abstracted on top of Symfony and such an abstraction provides better cross-platform compatibility.

In this post you can find example commands to completely setup a Drupal installation from console on Windows (without Linux bash, real Command line or Powershell scripts):

http://www.drupalonwindows.com/en/blog/continuous-integration-and-testing-drupal-appveyor

The sample commands there include:

• Setting up a code base from scratch using Composer
• Installing the website from the command line using "drupal install" command.
• Enabling/downloading modules using composer and the "drupal module:install" command.
• Running drupal tests from the console

Not an answer to your question, but running PHP/Drupal on Windows is just asking for problems.

It depends on your budget.

If you are doing brochureware/low budget, you are better off not even setting up an environment at all and looking a Platform.sh, Acquia, Pantheon, etc.

Indeed, Wordress is a much better product for such scenarios (low budget/quickies).