How to access a remote site using the command line (with drush)?

Question

I don´t know how to use drush nor the command line, so I´ve started to read some tutorials, and watch some videos. I´ve installed the drush windows installer, because I have windows.

The thing is that all examples I´ve read so far, start with localhost. What if I have my devel installation in a shared hosting or a VPS, in the cloud? How to access that?

Using my ftp program, I access it using hostname ftp.mysite.com the username and the password to that account. How may I do that with the command line?

Thanks!

Answer 1

If I understand correctly, you want to just use Drush on remote site. You don't need to do anything with aliases.drushrc.php for it. You need to have access to SSH on your remote server, there are many tutorials on the net how to use SSH. You need to upload Drush through SSH on server - create a folder, like "programs" (it would be nice if it would be not accessible through http) and put there drush-7.x-5.8.tar.gz . Untar it with command:

tar -zxvf drush-7.x-5.8.tar.gz

Next: Edit your .bash_profile file located in your home directory or create it (you can use command "nano .bash_profile" in your home directory), and put there:

export DRUSH_PHP=[absolute path to your php]/bin/php-cli

For example: "export DRUSH_PHP=/usr/local/php54/bin/php-cli" - you can check this path in output of your phpinfo().

Also add this line:

PATH=~/programs/drush:${PATH}

After this if you are logged on your remote server through SSH, you can go to directory of your Drupal site and use command "drush status" to check if everything works ok. Voila - you have drush installed on your server.

Answer 2

1. go into your drush folder
2. Copy the file examples/example.aliases.drushrc.php to root of your drush folder and rename it to aliases.drushrc.php
3. Read the comments in that file and this slideshare
4. create your aliases for both the local site and development site (on shared or vps)
5. make sure you have a proper ssh connection setup to your remote server

Answer 3

To access a remote server using the command line, you usually use ssh.

For windows, you can use a tool called PuTTY - there's a tutorial here: http://support.suso.com/supki/SSH_Tutorial_for_Windows

Answer 4

See this post for Drupal on shared hosting accounts: Installing Older Versions of Drush on Shared Hosting Accounts. Here is an excerpt about it:

These instructions are for installing older versions of Drush that pre-date the Composer requirement. Please try to install Drush using the method in Installing Drush 6 and 7 on Shared Hosting Accounts first, unless you need an older version of Drush, or you cannot install Composer on your shared host.