Drush is a tool to interact with Drupal and Features is a community module that allows you package a collection of configuration values and code to be re-usable across project; more typically Features is used by developers to simply move Drupal configuration between your development server and your production server.
In Features and its Admin UI you may select configuration values (which are Exportable — not everything is exportable) and create a Feature select components.
Using the Features Admin UI to complete these tasks for a full website (with dozens of Features perhaps) can get boring, and tedious. It’s much easier at times to do this via the command line and Drush when using Features on your website. Here is a small website Features’ listing that I recently created; each Feature is used to encapsulate a piece of the code/configuration needed for that chunk of the website (a Dashboard admin page, Search pages, Theme coloring, written content on the site — whatever):
When creating a Feature to export as an example a custom View to code you would issue the following:
drush features-export newfeature views_mycustomview
But, this is only 1 View … you may have many many such Views and configuration items on the site. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to use wildcards or something to quickly select all Views into the Feature you want to make? You can! Drush supports this when we review the Help documentation using drush help features-export:
Export a feature from your site into a module. If called with no arguments, display a list of available components. If called with a single argument, attempt to create a feature including the given component with the same name. The option '--destination=foo' may be used to specify the path (from Drupal root) where the feature should be created. The default destination is 'sites/all/modules'. The option '--version-set=foo' may be used to specify a version number for the feature or the option '--version-increment' may also to increment the feature's version number. Arguments: feature Feature name to export. components Patterns of components to include, see features-components for the format of patterns. Options: --destination Destination path (from Drupal root) of the exported feature. Defaults to 'sites/all/modules' --version-increment Increment the feature's version number. --version-set Specify a version number for the feature. Aliases: fee
And then if we look at the help text for drush help features-components:
drush help features-components List feature components matching patterns. The listing may be limited to exported/not-exported components. A component pattern consists of a source, a colon and a component. Both source and component may be a full name (as in "dependencies"), a shorthand (for instance "dep") or a pattern (like "%denci%"). Shorthands are unique shortenings of a name. They will only match if exactly one option contains the shorthand. So in a standard installation, "dep" will work for dependencies, but "user" wont, as it matches both user_permission and user_role. Patterns uses * or % for matching multiple sources/components. Unlike shorthands, patterns must match the whole name, so "field:%article%" should be used to select all fields containing "article" (which could both be those on the node type article, as well as those fields named article). * and % are equivalent, but the latter doesn't have to be escaped in UNIX shells. Lastly, a pattern without a colon is interpreted as having ":%" appended, for easy listing of all components of a source. Arguments: patterns The features components type to list. Omit this argument to list all components. Options: --exported Show only components that have been exported. --not-exported Show only components that have not been exported. Aliases: fc
We see that we can indeed to a bulk export of various Components into our Feature upon creation. Exporting all Views on our site would be as easy as:
drush fe my_sample_feature views_*
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