Downloading Modules and Themes when ftp.drupal.org is Down

As of this posting, ftp.drupal.org has been down for about five hours. This is kind of a bummer, because as long as FTP is down, you can't download new modules.

Or so I thought. If you use Drush, you can easily check out the code for the latest stable release of a module from CVS using the --package-handler argument:

drush dl betterselect --package-handler=cvs

As always, Drush figures out which version of the module (or theme) is the latest and grabs that for you. The only difference from using ftp.drupal.org is that you'll get the CVS folder in your sites/…/modules directory, but you can just delete it. Or not. It's not hurting anything.

Even if you're not using Drush, though, you can always check the code out from CVS directly.

The really funny thing, however, is that if you're not already using Drush, you can't use Drush to download Drush, which you could do if you were already using Drush — in which case, of course, you would not need to. I believe the lit kids call this "irony".