Download Different Versions of Drupal with Drush

If you use Drush, it’s likely that you’ve used the drush pm-download (or drush dl for short) command to start a new project. This command downloads projects from Drupal.org, but if you don’t specify a project or type “drush dl drupal”, the command will download the current stable version of Drupal core. Currently, this will be Drupal 7 with that being the current stable version of core at the time of writing this post.

But what if you don’t want Drupal 7?

I still maintain a number of Drupal 6 sites and occassionally need to download Drupal 6 core as opposed to Drupal 7. I’m also experimenting with Drupal 8 so I need to download that as well.

By declarding the core version of Drupal, such as “drupal-6”, Drush will download that instead.

$ drush dl drupal-6

This downloads the most recent stable version of Drupal 6. If you don’t want that, you can add the —select and additionally the —all options to be presented with an entire list to chose from.

$ drush dl drupal-6 --select
$ drush dl drupal-6 --select --all

If you want the most recent development version, just type:

$ drush dl drupal-6.x

The same can be done for other core versions of Drupal, from Drupal 5 upwards.

# This will download Drupal 5
$ drush dl drupal-5
# This will download Drupal 8
$ drush dl drupal-8

For a full list of the available options, type “drush help pm-download” into a Terminal window or take a look at the entry on drush.ws.