Drush and Features Servers

Feature Servers have great potential to help structure the use of code sourced outside the formal ecosphere around Drupal.Org this has it’s pro’s and con’s, but I already see their usefulness in providing a little more structure to issue-queue code exchanges and organization-internal modules. So let’s bring Drush into this and boost the ease of use of that usefulness another step up.

For those who need more catching up:
Features are a special kind of Drupal module built on the features project. They allow you to easily export configuration from your site into a module usable on any site. Modules downloaded from a Features Server are the next best thing to one posted to Drupal.org. DrupalConSF has a great video.

Current State

The rise of Feature Servers, and perhaps other types of code release repositories would benefit from a little Drush magic. The little-documented option of –source is a starting place:

drush --source=http://code.developmentseed.org/fserver/ dl fserver 

This code will grab the latest, most recommended release of the Feature Server code from DevSeed’s feature server.

Future Directions

I’ve started an issue in the Drush queue to talk about some kind of repository scheme to help manage the download and file placement of code from individually preferred repositories.