drush

When you use Drush, especially in crontabs, you may sometimes be bitten by RAM or duration limits. Of course, running Drush with the "-d" option will provide this information, but it will only do so at the end of an annoyingly noisy output debugging the whole command run.

On the other hand, just running the Drush command within a time command won't provide fine memory reporting. Luckily Drush implements hooks to make acquiring this information easily, so here is a small gist you can use as a standalone Drush plugin or add to a module of your own:

One of the big trends during the Drupal 8 creation has been the replacement of info hooks by two main mechanisms: annotations, and YAML files. In that light, hook_drush_command(), as the CLI equivalent of the late hook_menu, replaced by various YAML files, looks just like a perfect candidate for replacement by a commands section in some mymodule.drush.yml configuration file. Turns out it is incredibly easy to achieve. Let's see how to kill some hundred lines of code real fast !

One of the interesting aspects of the revamped menu/links system in Drupal 8 is the fact that menu links are now in easily parseable YAML files, the "(module).links.menu.yml" in each module, in which each menu link can be bound to its parent link, hopefully producing a tree-like structure.

The issue

These last few days, I had noticed a problem with Drush Make and patches: some patches, be they rolled by our team or from elsewhere, would apply without a glitch, but some others, which worked normally according to the test bot on Drupal.org, would fail to apply without any obvious reason.

I had mostly put it out of my list of pressing issues when I really had to use an old version of OpenLayers, 7.x-2.0-alpha2 to be specific, AND apply a patch fixing one of the bugs in that module: behaviors plugin not being located correctly (http://drupal.org/node/1898662 if you want details). So I rolled the patch, tested it locally, the qa.d.o bot applied it and did not report more errors than expected for that old version.... and my Drush Make install refused to apply it.

Here was the relevant excerpt:

projects[domain] = 3.7
projects[domain][patch][] = "http://drupal.org/files/domain-foreach_argument-1879502-1.patch"
; ...snip...
projects[openlayers] = 2.0-alpha2
projects[openlayers][patch][] = "http://drupal.org/files/0001-Fix-the-path-file-declaration-for-behaviors.patch"
The Domain patch applied normally, but the OpenLayers patch would't apply. What could be wrong ?

Sometimes, you want to delete a whole bunch of users, terms, or nodes, say to cleanup a site while developing and still keep its configuration, so reinstalling is not really an option, and the normal content- or user-administration pages get in your way because they only show a limited number of entries, meaning you have to delete page after page of entries.