When you create a custom Drush command it might be useful to allow users to pass options (predefined values) that change the way a command works. You can think of options as being flags, or variables, that affect the command's internal logic. As an example, consider the Drush core user:login command which by default returns a one-time login link for the root account. The command also accepts an optional --name option which allows the internal logic to create a link for a specified user instead of only being able to create links for the root user. This makes the command useful in a wider variety of situations. Another common option is the --format option which allows a user to specify that they want the command to return its output in a format (CSV, JSON, Table, etc.) other than the default.

Options are defined in the Drush command's attributes. Their values are passed as part of an associative array to the command method. Unlike parameters, options are not ordered, so you can specify them in any order, and they are called with two dashes like --my-option. Options are always optional, not required, and can be set up to accept a value --name=John or as a boolean flag without a value --translate.

In this tutorial we'll:

• Declare options for a custom Drush command in its attributes
• Learn how to use these options inside the custom Drush command method

By the end of this tutorial, you should be able to add options to your own custom Drush commands.

Drush commands are commonly run in the Drupal docroot, the directory where Drupal's files live. This is a relatively simple task on your local development environment. But if you're working on multiple sites and each of those sites has one or more remote environments that you connect to via SSH, workflows quickly become complicated. Creating and using Drush site aliases allows you to run Drush commands on any site, local or remote, that you have credentials to access, from any location on your computer that has access to a Drush executable.

Imagine you've got a Drupal project with dev, test, and live environments in the cloud somewhere. And you need to clear the cache on the dev environment. You could SSH to that environment, and execute drush cr there. Or, after configuring a site alias you could do something like:

drush @provider.dev cr -y

And Drush will connect to the remote environment and clear the cache.

Site aliases allow bundling the configuration options (--uri, --root, etc.) for a specific remote server under an alias. This reduces the amount of typing required. Even more importantly, it helps teams agree on a common definition for environments like @dev, @test, and @live by committing their configurations to version control.

In this tutorial we'll:

• Define what a Drush site alias is
• Understand the use case for aliases
• Learn how to configure and use Drush site aliases

By the end of this tutorial, you should understand how Drush site aliases work, how to create Drush site aliases, and how to use them in a Drush command.

The Drush executable can be configured through the use of YAML configuration files and environment variables. This configuration can help cut down on typing lengthy frequently-used commands. You can tell Drush to look for command files in project-specific locations. Configuration can also set the value(s) of a specific command's options, instead of having to type them at the command line every time.

In this tutorial we'll:

• Explore different Drush configuration options
• Learn how to configure Drush for your project

By the end of this tutorial, you'll know how to provide project specific, and global, configuration that helps customize Drush and improve your own efficiency.

Creating a custom Drush command requires creating a PHP class that Drush can find with methods that have PHP attributes that provide metadata about each custom command. You'll use an autowire trait to inject any services into it. You'll also optionally modify the project's composer.json to tell Drush what versions of Drush the command is compatible with.

Custom Drush commands are a great way to expose your custom module's features to help automate these tasks and allow users to perform them as background processes. They can also provide a more efficient way to execute PHP code that takes a long time and is prone to timing out when run via the web server.

Depending on your use-case it can also be more efficient to create a custom Drush command to execute your logic instead of coding a complete UI. For example, if all the command needs to do is generate a CSV list it might take less effort to write a Drush command and pipe the output to a file than to create a UI that generates a file and prompts the user to download it.

In this tutorial we'll:

• Declare a new custom Drush command inside a custom module
• Make our custom Drush command output a list of all the blocked users on the site
• Verify our new command is working

By the end of this tutorial you should understand how to create a custom Drush command that returns a list of blocked users.

Developers can implement the Drush Command API to write their own custom Drush commands. This allows you to include Drush commands with your modules to allow the module's features to be used via the CLI. You can also create project-specific Drush commands that help with the development, deployment, and maintenance of your particular application.

We've written Drush commands to help generate reports, make it easier for new team members to get up and running, compile custom theme assets, and more. Any time we need to write PHP code that interacts with our Drupal site where we're worried the code might time out because it takes too long to execute we'll reach for Drush. Custom Drush commands are also useful to combine background processes that can be executed on cron, such as nightly imports, data synchronization, bulk database manipulation, custom queues processing, and so much more.

In this tutorial we'll:

• Learn about different types of custom Drush commands
• Review the anatomy of a Drush command
• See how the Drush bootstrap process relates to commands

By the end of this tutorial, you'll be able to identify the parts of a custom Drush command and start writing your own.

One of the problems that Drush solves for developers is the automation and optimization of routine tasks. Drush commands attempt to speed up workflows and tasks that developers and site maintainers would otherwise have to do manually through the UI, or run one-by-one via the command line. One of those tasks is the process of deploying changes to a Drupal application from one environment to another.

The typical Drupal deployment process consists of repeatable steps such as importing configuration changes, applying database updates, and clearing the cache. Drush comes with the handy drush deploy command that allows you to automate the execution of all of these tasks post code deployment.

In this tutorial we'll:

• Learn about the drush deploy command
• Discuss when you would use the deploy command

By the end of this tutorial you'll know how to use the drush deploy command in conjunction with other useful deployment-related commands to help automate the task of deploying changes to a Drupal site's configuration and code.

Some Drush commands return a lot of information -- lists of modules, generators, and status reports, for example. It might be hard to find a property you need in the small command window output. Luckily, the output of Drush commands can be piped to other commands, used as a source for imports, settings for CI, and other DevOps tasks.

In order to accommodate all these different use cases, Drush comes with a formatting system that allows you to format and filter output to meet your needs. This system allows to you specify what fields you want returned when the output contains more than one field. It also allows Drush command output to be formatted as JSON, XML, raw PHP, a table, and more.

In this tutorial we'll:

• Learn how to specify the output format -- and what formats are available
• Limit the fields that are returned in a report
• Learn to filter the output to only the data we're interested in

By the end of this tutorial you'll know how to format a Drush command's output to fit your needs.

If you want to change the way an existing Drush command works, you use hooks. Hooks are useful for altering command parameters, options, attributes data, and adding custom logic during particular stages of the command execution process. Drush hooks are conceptually similar to Drupal hooks.

Hooks are methods on a Drush command class with an attribute indicating what hook is being implemented, and thus when the code should be invoked. The code in the methods is executed during specific stages of the command cycle. Developers can use core hooks -- predefined methods that come with Drush core -- or declare a custom hook that other commands can use.

In this tutorial we'll:

• Explore the different core Drush hooks
• Learn which hooks are called at what stage of the command cycle
• View example hook attributes and method implementations

By the end of this tutorial you'll know what types of core hooks are available to you and when they are called.

Adding logging and error handling are an important part of authoring Drush commands. Logs allow developers to get timely feedback from a command and inform users about potential alterations and flags, events to monitor, and the progress of long-running commands. Correct error handling allows for clean exits, meaningful error descriptions, and provides a path forward for developers to fix the errors and accomplish their goals.

In this tutorial we'll:

• Explore the different types of logging messages Drush commands can output
• Learn how to handle errors from within a Drush command

By the end of this tutorial you'll know what types of log messages you can use; how to log success messages, errors, or debug statements from a custom Drush command; and how to handle errors and exceptions.

When the logic of a command depends on user input, it's useful to set up an interactive questionnaire inside the command code. This allows you to provide the user with more context about the input they're providing, and ensure that you collect all the necessary values. This is especially useful when the command uses a pre-defined list of options and the values require memorization. An example of this is the drush cache-clear command that comes with Drush core. It requires an argument indicating which cache to clear, which you can specify at the command line; however, if you invoke the command with no arguments it will present you with a list of cache bins to choose from and a UI for selecting one.

Drush 9+ can access the Input/Output (I/O) object via the $this->io() method. This object -- an instance of \Drush\Style\DrushStyle -- holds information about user-provided input, and utilities for manipulating that input. To ask a user a question, use an io() object in the command callback method. It can take over the execution flow of the command as needed to stop and gather additional input. The I/O system has various methods for asking confirmation or choice questions such as confirm() and select().

In addition to prompting for input, the I/O object can be used to provide other styling to the command, like progress bars.

In this tutorial we'll:

• Learn how to prompt the user for additional input
• Process the user's answer as part of the command execution flow

By the end of this tutorial you should understand how to prompt a user for additional input for a custom Drush command.

While Drush empowers all Drupal users with its commands, it's even more powerful when used in combination with scripting solutions such as Composer and Bash. Scripts can be used to power post-deployment tasks like importing new configuration or clearing the cache, as part of CI processes to sync a database from one environment to another, to run background processes on the server such as imports and migrations, search indexing, running cron, and much more. If you want to write Bash (or any other scripts) that interact with a Drupal site, then Drush is the tool for you.

In this tutorial we'll:

• Learn how to use Drush commands within Composer and Bash scripts
• Learn how to chain multiple Drush commands together in a script

By the end of this tutorial you'll know how to use Drush as part of a script that automates common or tedious tasks.

When you manage many Drupal websites, you may perform repetitive tasks that are common across all of your sites. In our experience, this usually relates to having a personal preference for how certain tasks are accomplished. For example, maybe you like to make backups of the database and files in a specific way before testing upgrades, or you have a set of scripts for running scans of core web vitals. Although these tasks can be bundled into a custom module, it could be useful to create a site-wide Drush command instead. Site-wide commands can be installed with Composer, managed in a separate Git repository, and act as a project dependency. This way they are easy to maintain through a separate upstream. Changes to this code will be reflected on all the sites where it's used.

In this tutorial we'll:

• Declare a custom site-wide Drush command
• Demonstrate how to use Composer to manage a package that contains a Drush command

By the end of this tutorial you'll be able to create a site-wide Drush command and manage the code with Git and Composer.

Media source plugins provide the link between media entities in Drupal and the actual media asset itself. They are the code that understand the difference between an image, a video, and a Tweet, and perform the translation that allows the media ecosystem to treat all media entities equally. For example, local image files, and remote YouTube videos, can both be catalogued in a similar way as media entities, but they need very different handling when it comes to displaying them.

Media sources are represented as plugins, there are a handful in Drupal core, and a developer can add new plugins to represent any type of media your application needs to catalogue.

In this tutorial we'll learn:

• How media source plugins relate to Media Types
• The responsibilities of a media source plugin

By the end of this tutorial you should be able to define the role of a media source plugin and understand what's required to define your own.

The Drupal core Media Library module provides an enhanced user interface for locating Media entities and attaching them to an article. It's a drop-in replacement for the default entity reference widget which uses a not very intuitive autocomplete field. Using the Drupal core Media Library module requires minimal configuration.

If you want to provide content creators with a gallery-like library of Media entities that they can browse through in order to find the ones they want to add to their content, the Media Library is the easiest way to do it. It can be configured to work with both Media fields and the CKEditor powered WYSIWYG editor commonly used for editing the body field of Drupal nodes. There's really no reason not to use it.

In addition to providing a better UI for locating existing Media entities, the Media Library provides a way to create new Media entities right from the content creation form. This prevents an otherwise confusing requirement where Media entities need to be created, via a different set of forms, before they can be used.

In this tutorial we'll:

• Install and configure the Media Library module to work with Media fields
• Use the user interface provided by the Media Library to improve the experience of finding and selecting Media entities to associate with a piece of content

By the end of this tutorial you'll know how to replace the default entity reference widget used for selecting Media entities with the much improved Media Library UI.

Media entities, like any content entity, work great with all the different features Drupal provides for changing the way things are displayed: view modes, Layout Builder, theme templates, and more. We're big fans of using view modes to create a component-like design system where entity types have view modes representing the different context in which they're displayed. Then we theme the view modes. This works great for displaying Media entities associated with a page and for changing the way that Media assets are displayed within the Media Library browser.

In this tutorial we'll:

• Create Hero and Sidebar view modes for Media entities
• Configure the Image Media type to use the new view modes and style each one differently
• Use the new view modes to render Image Media assets within a Layout
• Update the Media library view mode that's used by the Media Library browser to display additional information alongside the thumbnails used when selecting Media to attach to a page

By the end of this tutorial you should be able to change the way that Media assets are displayed by using view modes and display formatters in a Drupal site.

Drupal 8.8.0 introduced a bunch of new features intended to make it easier over the long-term to maintain a Drupal project using Composer. In doing so it establishes some new best practices, and moves into Drupal core solutions that were previously maintained by the community. This is all good news. But, it means if you're using Composer to update from Drupal 8.7.x or lower to 8.8.0 or higher you'll need to do a bit of additional work to untangle everything.

This tutorial is especially useful if you started your Drupal project using the drupal-composer/drupal-project template and would like to convert to use the new templates (i.e. drupal/recommended-project or drupal/legacy-project) included with Drupal 8.8.x core.

In this tutorial we'll:

• Convert our project to use the new drupal/core-recommended, and drupal/core-dev Composer packages
• Explain which commonly used Composer packages are deprecated, and which new ones replace them
• Learn how to use the drupal/core-composer-scaffold Composer plugin
• Cover tips for troubleshooting updates

Furthermore, in order to Upgrade to Drupal 9 from Drupal 8, you will first need to update your Drupal 8 site to at least version 8.8, as the upgrade paths for Drupal 8 site from before Drupal 8.8.0 have been removed from Drupal 9.

By the end of this tutorial you should be able to update your Drupal projects using Drupal core 8.7.x or lower to Drupal core 8.8.0 or higher using Composer. And be ready for an upgrade to Drupal 9.

Drupal's development has a regular release cycle consisting of major, minor, and patch releases. Drupal releases use semantic versioning for its version numbers. Since we're committed to making sure our tutorials are kept up-to-date with the latest and greatest version of Drupal we figured it would be a good idea if you knew how to keep your Drupal site up-to-date with the latest "point" releases as well.

This tutorial will cover:

• How to determine the type of update
• The standard update procedure
• Update Drupal using Drush
• Update Drupal using Composer

This tutorial won't cover:

• How to perform a major version Drupal upgrade, for example, from Drupal 6 or 7 to the latest version of Drupal. For that, see our guide, Learn to Migrate to Drupal.

There’s no one-size-fits-all path to upgrade from Drupal 9 to Drupal 10, but there is a set of common tasks that everyone will need to complete.

In this tutorial we’ll:

• Explain the differences between Drupal 9 and Drupal 10 that affect the upgrade path.
• Walk through the high-level steps required to upgrade from Drupal 9 to Drupal 10.
• Provide resources to help you create an upgrade checklist and start checking items off the list.

By the end of this tutorial you should be able to explain the major differences between Drupal 9 and 10, audit your existing Drupal 9 projects for Drupal 10 readiness, estimate the level of effort involved, and start the process of upgrading.

There’s no one-size-fits-all path to upgrade from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9, but there is a set of common tasks that everyone will need to complete.

In this tutorial we’ll:

• Explain the differences between Drupal 8 and Drupal 9 that affect the upgrade path.
• Walk through the high-level steps required to upgrade from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9.
• Provide resources to help you create an upgrade checklist and start checking items off the list.

By the end of this tutorial you should be able to explain the major differences between Drupal 8 and 9, audit your existing Drupal 8 projects for Drupal 9 readiness, estimate the level of effort involved, and start the process of upgrading.

Knowing how to clear Drupal's cache is an important skill for any developer. You'll likely find yourself doing it frequently in order to get Drupal to register the changes you make to your code, or other updates you make via the UI. It is also a good first step to trouble shooting problems with your Drupal site: Clear the cache before you do any other debugging to ensure it's not just a bad cache entry.