How to export 1 or several specific rules?

Question

I want to export one or more specific rules or components using Drush.
I do have a script to export all the rules and components.

drush --pipe rules-list | xargs -I{}  sh -c "drush rules-export '{}' > '20210623-new-Rules-export-offline/{}.txt'"

20210623-new-Rules-export-offline is the directory where the exported rules are saved.

Is there something I need to change to this code in order to export the specific rules I want to export?

I created a Rules VBO View to have better access to all those rules, but the export to a file feature doesn't seem to be provided.

Answer 1

drush rules-list is used to list all the Rules on your site.

drush rules-export <rule-machine-name> will export a specific Rule.

The command you show above simply takes the output of the rules-list command and passes it to rules-export, in effect looping over all the Rules and exporting each one.

Answer 2

To export more than one rule, but only the rules whose name is given in a list, I would use the following code.

#!/usr/bin/bash

# The list of item names to export
items=(item1 item2 item3)
for item in "${items[@]}"; do
  drush rules-export "$item" > "${item}.txt"
done

This is simpler than getting the list of existing rules from drush rules-list --pipe, remove the items in that list that don't match the rule names you want to export, and then run drush rules-export on the left items.

If you had a list of names, which could be either component names or rule names, and you wanted to export only rules, the code would be similar to the following one.

#!/usr/bin/bash

# The list of items to export, which could include component names
names=(name1 name2 name3)

# Get a list of rule names only, and convert it in an array.
rules=( $(drush rules-list --pipe --type=rule) )

# Create an array with items that are in both the arrays.
exports=( $(comm -12 <(printf '%s\n' "${names[@]}" | LC_ALL=C sort) <(printf '%s\n' "${rules[@]}" | LC_ALL=C sort)) )

# Export the items whose names are in the exports array, which contains only rule names.
for export in "${exports[@]}"; do
  drush rules-export "$export" > "${export}.txt"
done