Is Drush abandoned?

Question

I installed Drush via Composer (like the Drush site recommends). Every time I run drush dl drupal-7.x, I get a message telling me that I should use Composer.

[notice] dl has been deprecated. Please build your site using Composer. Add new projects with composer require drupal/[project-name]. Use https://www.drupal.org/project/composer_generate to build a composer.json which represents the the enabled modules on your site.

I downloaded Drupal 8 following these instructions for installing Drupal via Composer, but when I run drush dl devel in that project I get this message.

This codebase is assembled with Composer instead of Drush. Use composer update and composer require instead of drush pm-updatecode and drush pm-download. You may override this error by using the --pm-force option.

Is there something wrong with my local env, or is Drush a thing of the past now?

Answer 1

You have installed the development master branch of Drush. To continue using commands such as drush dl, drush pm-update and so on, you should install the 8.x branch of Drush.

However, your basic supposition is correct. The Drupal community is moving towards Composer and away from drush make and the drush pm-* commands. The reason for this is that more and more Drupal modules are depending on code that is distributed via Composer libraries. When using modules with Composer dependencies, the most convenient way to manage your Drupal site is through Composer. See drupal-composer/drupal-project for an example of this.

All of the other Drush commands are still relevant and remain useful.