Packaging Drush and Dependencies for Debian

Lately I have been trying to avoid non packaged software being installed on production servers. The main reason for this is to make it easier to apply updates. It also makes it easier to deploy new servers with meta packages when everything is pre packaged.

One tool which I am using a lot on production servers is Drupal’s command line tool - drush. Drush is awesome it makes managing Drupal sites so much easier, especially when it comes to applying updates. Drush is packaged for Debian testing, unstable and lenny backports by Antoine Beaupré (aka anarcat) and will be available in universe for ubuntu lucid. Drush depends on PEAR’s Console_Table module and includes some code which automagically installs the dependency from PEAR CVS. The Debianised package includes the PEAR class in the package, which is handy, but if you are building your own debs from CVS or the nightly tarballs, the dependency isn’t included. The auto installer only works if it can write to /path/to/drush/includes, which in these cases means calling drush as root, otherwise it spews a few errors about not being able to write the file then dies.

A more packaging friendly approach would be to build a Debian package for PEAR Console_Table and have that as a dependency of the drush package in Debian. The problem with this approach is that drush currently only looks in /path/to/drush/includes for the PEAR class. I have submitted a patch which first checks if Table_Console has been installed via the PEAR installer (or other package management tool). Combine this with the Debian source package I have created for Table_Console (see the file attached at the bottom of the post), you can have a modular and apt managed instance of drush, without having to duplicate code.

I have discussed this approach with anarcat, he is supportive and hopefully it will be the approach adopted for drush 3.0.

Update The drush patch has been committed and should be included in 3.0alpha2.