We're big fans of Drush. It's installed on all of our servers and it's a great way to perform maintenance tasks, download core and modules, and much much more. I'm not a big fan of installing from zip files though, so let's use git to easily keep our Drush install up to date.

On Snow Leopard, you can install drush without using sudo. A dependency for installing drush is downloading a Pear library. The following example should allow you to be able to use the following commands to install drush to /usr/local/drush with a symlink in /usr/local/bin/drush, but it fails on the 'pear download' step, even though it's writing to a user-writeable directory. Read on the figure out how to fix this annoying problem.

At EchoDitto, we host a lot of Drupal sites. Just about all of our web servers contain more than one completely separate Drupal cores since we develop most of our websites independently. We also keep an eye out on Drupal Security and when to apply core updates. Since we're not using Aegir, nor do we run every site off of a single multi-site core install, we need a quick and easy way to see what versions we're running.

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 Git using the --package-handler argument:

drush dl betterselect --package-handler=git_drupalorg

As always, Drush figures out which version of the module (or theme) is the latest and grabs that for you.

Let's start here: Drupal for Firebug is amazing. I'll even go so far as to say that it's more useful than Devel Themer. More details below, but you should start by downloading the Drupal for Firebug Firefox extension (or the Chrome one) and drush dl drupalforfirebug on a local project and giving it a spin.