Drall is a tool that helps run drush commands on multi-site Drupal installations.

One command to drush them all. — Jigarius

A big thanks and shout-out to Symetris for sponsoring the initial development of Drall.

Drall is listed on Packagist.org. Thus, it can easily be installed using composer as follows:

composer require jigarius/drall

Drall's functioning depends on its Placeholders. Here's how Drall works under the hood:

1. Receive a command, say, drall exec COMMAND.
2. Ensure there is a @@placeholder in COMMAND.
3. Run COMMAND after replacing @@placeholder with site-specific values.
4. Display the result.

Drall supports the following placeholders:

This placeholder is replaced with the name of the site's directory under Drupal's sites directory. These are the values of the $sites array usually defined in sites.php.

# @@dir is replaced with "ralph" and "leo".
$sites['raphael.com'] = 'ralph';
$sites['leonardo.com'] = 'leo';

Note: In older versions of Drall, this was called @@uri.

This placeholder is replaced with keys of the $sites array.

# @@key is replaced with "raphael.com", "raphael.local" and "leonardo.com".
$sites['raphael.com'] = 'ralph';
$sites['raphael.local'] = 'ralph';
$sites['leonardo.com'] = 'leo';

This placeholder is replaced with unique keys of the $sites array. If a site has multiple keys, the last one is used as its unique key.

# @@key is replaced with "raphael.local" and "leonardo.local".
$sites['raphael.com'] = 'ralph';
$sites['raphael.local'] = 'ralph';
$sites['leonardo.com'] = 'leo';
$sites['leonardo.local'] = 'leo';

This placeholder is replaced with the first part of the site's alias.

# @@site is replaced with "@ralph" and "@leo".
@ralph.local
@leo.local

Note: This placeholder only works for sites with Drush aliases.

To see a list of commands offered by Drall, run drall list. If you feel lost, run drall help or continue reading this documentation.

With exec you can execute drush as well as non-drush commands on multiple sites in your Drupal installation.

In Drall 2.x there were 2 exec commands. These are now unified into a single command just like version 1.x.

• drall exec:drush ... is now drall exec drush ...
• drall exec:shell ... is now drall exec ...

When drall exec receives a signal to interrupt (usually ctrl c), Drall stops after processing the site that is currently being processed. This prevents the current command from terminating abruptly. However, if a second interrupt signal is received, then Drall stops immediately.

In this method, the --uri option is sent to drush.

drall exec -- drush --uri=@@dir core:status

If it is a Drush command and no valid @@placeholder are present, then --uri=@@dir is automatically added after each occurrence of drush.

# Raw drush command (no placeholders)
drall exec drush core:status
# Command that is executed (placeholders injected)
drall exec -- drush --uri=@@dir core:status

$ drall exec drush core:status
drush --uri=default core:status
drush --uri=donnie core:status
drush --uri=leo core:status
drush --uri=mikey core:status
drush --uri=ralph core:status

In this method, a site alias is sent to drush.

drall exec drush @@site.local core:status

$ drall exec drush @@site.local core:status
drush @tmnt.local core:status
drush @donnie.local core:status
drush @leo.local core:status
drush @mikey.local core:status
drush @ralph.local core:status

You can run non-Drush commands the same was as you run Drush commands. Just make sure that the command has valid placeholders.

Important: You can only use any one of the possible placeholders, e.g. if you use @@dir and you cannot mix it with @@site.

$ drall exec cat web/sites/@@uri/settings.local.php
cat web/sites/default/settings.local.php
cat web/sites/donnie/settings.local.php
cat web/sites/leo/settings.local.php
cat web/sites/mikey/settings.local.php
cat web/sites/ralph/settings.local.php

drall exec "drush @@site.dev updb -y && drush @@site.dev cim -y && drush @@site.dev cr"

For the drall exec command, all Drall options must be set right after drall exec. Additionally, -- must be used before the command to be executed. Following are some examples of running drush with options.

# Drall is --verbose
drall exec --verbose -- drush core:status
# Drush is verbose
drall exec -- drush --verbose core:status
# Both Drall and Drush are --verbose
drall exec --verbose -- drush --verbose core:status

In summary, the syntax is as follows:

drall exec [DRALL-OPTIONS] -- drush [DRUSH-OPTIONS]

Besides the global options, the exec command supports the following options.

This option makes Drall wait for n seconds after processing each item.

drall exec --interval=3 -- drush core:rebuild

Such an interval cannot be used when using a multiple workers.

Say you have 100 sites in a Drupal installation. By default, Drall runs commands on these sites one after the other. To speed up the execution, you can ask Drall to execute multiple commands in parallel. You can specify the number of workers with the --workers=n option, where n is the number of processes you want to run in parallel.

Please keep in mind that the performance of the workers depends on your resources available on the computer executing the command. If you have low memory, and you run Drall with 4 workers, performance might suffer. Also, some operations need to be executed sequentially to avoid competition and conflict between the Drall workers.

The command below launches 3 instances of Drall to run core:rebuild command.

drall exec --workers=3 -- drush core:rebuild

When a worker runs out of work, it terminates automatically.

By default, Drall displays a progress bar that indicates how many sites have been processed and how many are remaining. In verbose mode, this progress indicator also displays the time elapsed.

However, the progress display that can mess with some terminals or scripts which don't handle backspace characters. For these environments, the progress bar can be disabled using the --no-progress option.

drall exec --no-progress -- drush core:rebuild

This option allows you to see what commands will be executed without actually executing them.

$ drall exec --dry-run --group=bluish -- drush core:status
drush --uri=donnie core:status
drush --uri=leo core:status

Get a list of all available site directory names in the Drupal installation. All sites/* directories containing a settings.php file are treated as individual sites.

$ drall site:directories
default
donnie.com
leo.com
mikey.com
ralph.com

The output can then be iterated with scripts.

for site in $(drall site:directories)
do
  echo "Current site: $site";
done;

Get a list of all keys in $sites. Usually, these are site URIs.

$ drall site:keys
tmnt.com
donatello.com
leonardo.com
michelangelo.com
raphael.com

The output can then be iterated with scripts.

for site in $(drall site:keys)
do
  echo "Current site: $site";
done;

Get a list of site aliases.

$ drall site:aliases
@tmnt.local
@donnie.local
@leo.local
@mikey.local
@ralph.local

The output can then be iterated with scripts.

for site in $(drall site:aliases)
do
  echo "Current site: $site";
done;

This section covers some options that are supported by all drall commands.

Specify the target site group. See the section site groups for more information on site groups.

drall exec --group=GROUP -- drush core:status --field=site

If --group is not set, then the Drall uses the environment variable DRALL_GROUP, if it is set.

Filter placeholder values with an expression. This is helpful for running commands on specific sites.

# Run only on the "leo" site.
drall exec --filter=leo -- drush core:status
# Run only on "leo" and "ralph" sites.
drall exec --filter="leo||ralph" -- drush core:status

For more on using filter expressions, refer to the documentation on consolidation/filter-via-dot-access-data.

Display verbose output.

Display debug-level output.

Drall uses sites.php to determine site hostnames and site directories. However, some Drupal multi-site installations do not have a sites.php because the content of the DRUPAL/sites directory changes very frequently, thereby making it difficult to maintain such a sites.php.

In such cases, it is suggested that you create a DRUPAL/sites/sites.php based on misc/example.sites.php so that Drall can detect the sites in your Drupal installation. Additionally, in this file you can alter the $sites variable based on your requirements.

Drall allows you to group your sites so that you can run commands on these groups using the --group option.

In a site alias definition file, you can assign site aliases to one or more groups like this:

# File: tnmt.site.yml
local:
  root: /opt/drupal/web
  uri: http://tmnt.com/
  # ...
  drall:
    groups:
      - cartoon
      - action

This puts the alias @tnmt.local in the cartoon and action groups.

If your project doesn't use site aliases, you can still group your sites using one or more sites.GROUP.php files like this:

# File: sites.bluish.php
$sites['donnie.drall.local'] = 'donnie';
$sites['leo.drall.local'] = 'leo';

This puts the sites donnie and leo in a group named bluish.

Here's how you can set up a local dev environment.

• Clone the https://github.com/jigarius/drall repository.
  • Use a branch as per your needs.
• Run docker compose up -d.
• Run docker compose start.
• Run make ssh to launch a shell in the Drupal container.
• Run make provision.
• Run drall --version to test the setup.
• Run make lint to run linter.
• Run make test to run tests.

You should now be able to make ssh and then run drall. A multi-site Drupal installation should be present at /opt/drupal. Oh! And Drall should be present at /opt/drall.

To access the dev sites in your browser, add the following line to your hosts file. It is usually located at /etc/hosts. This is completely optional, so do this only if you need it.

127.0.0.1 tmnt.drall.local donnie.drall.local leo.drall.local mikey.drall.local ralph.drall.local

The sites should then be available at:

• tmnt.drall.local
• donnie.drall.local
• leo.drall.local
• mikey.drall.local
• ralph.drall.local

• Thanks, Symetris for funding the initial development.
• Thanks, Jigarius (that's me) for spending evenings and weekends to make this tool possible.