Managing your BitNami Drupal installation with Drush

We are happy to announce a new version of BitNami Drupal Stack. This new version includes support for Drush. Drush is a command line shell tool and scripting interface for Drupal designed to make life easier for people who need to deploy multiple Drupal installations.

Thanks to Drush you can easily manage your Drupal modules, edit configuration settings or backup your sites from the command line.

To get started, you first need to load the right environment. This is done automatically when logging in to a virtual appliance or cloud image. If you installed Drupal on your desktop, you can do so by executing:

/path/to/bitnami-drupal-install-directory/use_drupal

and on Windows by clicking on Start Menu > BitNami Drupal Stack > Use Drupal Stack.

The following are example commands you can run after that:

• Download and install a module, for example Content Construction Kit (CCK ) a popular plugin that allows adding custom fields to nodes using a web browser

          drush pm-download cck
    drush pm-enable cck

• Export the Drupal database as SQL, for backup purposes

    drush sql-dump > drupal_backup.sql

• Or you can backup everything, including your code, files, and database into a single file

    drush archive-dump default --destination=/backups/drupal_site.tar

•  Set a variable, for example the site email address

    drush variable-set site_mail mail@example.com

More information can be found in the official Drush guide. Thanks to OpenMelva for their suggestions and feedback Drush and other aspects of our Drupal stack.

BitNami Cloud Tools now with Amazon Simple Email Service

We're happy to announce that the BitNami Cloud Tools installer has been updated and now includes support for Amazon SES! As Amazon explains, "Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) is a highly scalable and cost-effective bulk and transactional email-sending service for businesses and developers." It integrates with other AWS services to make it easy to send mail from applications hosted on the Amazon Cloud. Since it is Perl-based, we include a precompiled, preconfigured Perl environment and supporting libraries for Linux (x86/x64) and     OS X. 

The updated installer also contains updates to the aws-ec2-api, aws-auto-scaling and aws-sdk-ruby  tools to versions 1.4.4.1, 1.0.39.0 and 1.1.2, respectively.

The BitNami Cloud Tools installer contains all of the available tools from Amazon for developing for AWS. To get started, simply download and run the installer and you'll be ready to start your cloud development project in minutes. Enjoy!