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When installing a new Drupal site (or when your list of available updates gets nice and long), you'll often have to download tons of modules, unpack them, and copy all of the resulting directories to your sites/all/modules directory. Personally, I'm not a fan of all the clicking, downloading, unzipping and most of all waiting!

Today I finally settled on a workflow that gets the job done, and it's called the UNIX command line. If your server doesn't use some flavor of UNIX or Linux, or if your web host doesn't allow you shell access, you may want to stop reading after the next paragraph.

Check to see if you can SSH in to your server by logging in via the Terminal: (Windows kids, grab PuTTY)

[yourterminal]$ ssh user@drupaleasy.com
user@drupaleasy.com's password:
Last login: Mon Jun 16 12:34:48 2008 from myserver
[user@host ~]$

If you can log in, great. You might get a message prompting you to add the server's RSA fingerprint to your list of known hosts. If you do, type "yes" and return. Of course, you'll want to navigate to your modules directory. Your web site's root may be located elsewhere, but on my server they are under the home directory of the user.

[user@host ~]$ cd public_html/sites/all/modules
[user@host modules]$

Next, you need a list of all the files you'd like to grab from the Drupal.org server. You can create one with vi on the command line or perform this next step manually. Make sure they are one per line. Create a file called downloads.txt with one URL per line (gotcha: if you create this file in a text editor on your windows or macintosh, try adding a space or tab to the end of each line). In this case we will be updating customerror and date:

http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/customerror-5.x-1.1.tar.gz
http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/date-5.x-2.0-rc.tar.gz

Now we will use the cat command to print the urls on the screen, and the scripting tool awk to grab all of these URLs using wget by piping the commands into bash:

[user@host modules]$ cat downloads.txt | awk '{print "wget " $1}' | bash
-11:23:43-- http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/customerror-5.x-1.1.tar.gz
=> `customerror-5.x-1.1.tar.gz'
Resolving ftp.drupal.org... 64.50.236.52, 64.50.238.52
Connecting to ftp.drupal.org|64.50.236.52|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 90,158 (88K) [application/x-gzip]

100%[====================================>] 90,158 367.30K/s

11:23:44 (367.00 KB/s) - `customerror-5.x-1.1.tar.gz' saved [90158/90158]

--11:24:07-- http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/date-5.x-2.0-rc.tar.gz
=> `date-5.x-2.0-rc.tar.gz'
Resolving ftp.drupal.org... 64.50.236.52, 64.50.238.52
Connecting to ftp.drupal.org|64.50.236.52|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 154,800 (151K) [application/x-gzip]

100%[====================================>] 154,800 525.96K/s

11:24:07 (524.28 KB/s) - `date-5.x-2.0-rc.tar.gz' saved [154800/154800]

[user@host modules]$ ls
customerror-5.x-1.1.tar.gz
date-5.x-2.0-rc.tar.gz
downloads.txt
[user@host modules]$ rm downloads.txt

You'll see bunches of such downloads happen if you've done everything right. An ls will reveal the new files you've downloaded. If everything went well, remove the downloads.txt file. If you are upgrading a few drupal sites, you may want to keep and edit this file for your other Drupal installations.

Now that we have the tarballs of all the current modules we'll need to unpack them, and preform any upgrades. Most minor releases of modules don't require running the upgrade script, but check your module's readme files for any special instructions. Also, if you've got modules containing external APIs like SimpleTest or FeedAPI, you might need to make a backup of those downloaded files and remember to copy those files back in after this step.

Now we get to the real fun stuff. awk is a tool that works on one line of text at a time, performs some instructions, prints the results, then starts over again. It's extremely powerful for renaming files and performing batch operations. In this case we're only unpacking two files, but most of my Drupal sites have dozens of modules. We'll be using tar to unzip and unarchive these modules into the proper directories:

[user@host modules]$ ls -1 | awk '{print "tar -xvzf " $1}' | bash

This command (if you use the -v option to tar) will print lots of stuff to the screen, and if you have any existing installations of modules, they will be overwritten, which is why I warned you to back up your externally distributed files. Next, visit your status report page admin/logs/status to see if you have to run the update.php or if there are any other broken features. Like your mother said, don't forget to clean up. You've still got some junk files in your modules directory:

[user@host modules]$ rm *.tar.gz

As a final exercise for the reader, you could write a small shell script that combines all of these commands - download using the arguments from the file, unzip everything, and delete the zip files, all by running one command. I'll leave it up to you to take this any further if you like.

Behind the Scenes

Here's a rundown of the commands we used:

| (the pipe)

takes the output of a command and feeds it into the input of the next command, like connecting two pipes together

cat

faithfully prints the contents of a text file

wget

downloads files from the internet over HTTP

ls -1

the -1 option prints all the contents of your directory in one column, suitable for awk or grep

tar -xvzf

x means extract, v means give us a verbose list of everything that's being done, z is for zip (or unzip), and f means I'll be telling you a file to act on

bash

provided the input is a valid shell command, calling bash inside of bash will execute a command - These commands often have other output which one can "pipe" on to other commands

awk

this is where the magic happens - programmers will recognize print and $1 (think PCRE Regular Expressions) - the curly braces are the operation to perform

One last bit of awk magic; if we only wanted to unpack modules in Organic Groups we should be able to do some simple pattern-matching to filter through the results:

[user@host modules]$ ls -1 | awk -F= '/og/ {print "tar -xvzf " $1}' | bash

awk can do lots and lots more than this - take a look at some resources online or power users should check out the excellent sed & awk book by O'Reilly if you want to dive deeper into this subject.