Backend and Infrastructure

Create Site-Wide Custom Drush Commands for Drupal 8, 9, 10, and 11

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.

Command Line Tools for Drupal