If you haven’t used Drush before (and you build Drupal websites, Drush is “a command line shell and Unix scripting interface for Drupal”. It has some amazingly useful commands for interacting with Drupal. You can do thing like:

drush dl views

And it will download and unpack the Views module into the correct folder. Then you would type:

drush enable views

And Views would be installed. Just like that. You can read the full documentation on Drupal.org.

What about using it in Dreamhost? It’s a little different because at the time of this writing, Dreamhost does not default to PHP 5 on the command line and you have to specify it to look at PHP 5. Here are the steps to install it on your Dreamhost account.

1. Download and Unpack Drush: First, you need to login to the shell of your Dreamhost account. In your home directory, download and unpack Drush. From the command line type:

   curl -O http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/drush-All-Versions-2.0.tar.gz

   (The latest version at the time of writing.)

   Now type:

   tar -zxf drush-All-Versions-2.0.tar.gz

   You should be left with a folder called drush that contains the drush library.

2. Get Drush on the Commandline: Now you need to make drush available to you on the command line. Open the file called .bash_profile by typing

   nano .bash_profile

   and navigate to the bottom of the screen. Enter the following line:

   alias drush='/usr/local/php5/bin/php /home/<dreamhost username>/drush/drush.php'

   (Don’t forget to replace <dreamhost username> with your Dreamhost username.) Now save the file with the keystroke CTRL + X

3. Logout: Now type exit to logout. This will force the shell to re-read the .bash_profile file.
4. Log Back In: Log back in and you should be ready to drush!