Drush command(s) run on Drupal 6 sites, but not Drupal 7? - php

Question

I am running into an issue with a customer's Drupal sites. He has a number of D6 installs, and a new D7 that he's just starting on. All of these sites are on the same shared hosting package.
The problem is when running certain drush commands only on the D7 site. There are no issues on the D6 sites. The specific error for drush up on the D7 site follows:
foo#bar [~/www/foo]# drush up
Command pm-update needs a higher bootstrap level to run - you will need to invoke drush [error]
from a more functional Drupal environment to run this command.
Command pm-update needs the following modules installed/enabled to run: update. [error]
The drush command 'up' could not be executed. [error]
Drush was not able to start (bootstrap) the Drupal database. [error]
Hint: This may occur when Drush is trying to:
* bootstrap a site that has not been installed or does not have a configured database. In
this case you can select another site with a working database setup by specifying the URI
to use with the --uri parameter on the command line. See `drush topic docs-aliases` for
details.
* connect the database through a socket. The socket file may be wrong or the php-cli may
have no access to it in a jailed shell. See http://drupal.org/node/1428638 for details.
Drush was attempting to connect to:
Drupal version : 7.28
Site URI : http://default
Database driver : mysql
Database username : username_foo
Database name : database_foo
PHP configuration :
PHP OS : Linux
Drush version : 7.0-dev
Drush temp directory : /tmp
Drush configuration :
Drush alias files :
Drupal root : /home/foo/www/foo
Site path : sites/default
Everything I can find (and indeed the link in the error message) say the solution is to change the host value in the settings.php file from localhost to 127.0.0.1. However, this has not been the solution for us.
The frontend site has no problems connecting to the database, and drush itself seemingly does in many cases too.
drush sql-connect will generate a string that you can use to connect to MySQL.
drush sql-cli will successfully connect to MySQL
The settings.php file is definitely in a folder called default (path: www/foo/sites/default) and I get the exact same error when specifying --root and --uri options.
Drush was originally a ~5.x release, and it had the same issues. We updated to the ~7.x to try to eliminate the error. The host value in settings.php has been localhost as well as 127.0.0.1 with equally poor results.
We've verified that MySQL is available via socket from the PHP CLI. Drush is up to date and a fresh install. The Drupal 7 site is a brand new fresh install.
I'm at a loss. Why would this work with the D6 sites, but not the D7? Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Is your settings.php file in a folder called 'default'? If not, you might need to tell Drush where to find it by using --uri=mysite.com or -l mysite.com.
There are several ways to specify which Drupal site Drush will target. The most basic option is fairly verbose; run:
$ drush --root=/path/to/drupal --uri=http://example.com status
You can do the same thing with a slightly different syntax:
$ drush /path/to/drupal#example.com status
You can also specify the Drupal site implicitly, by setting the cwd to the folder that contains the settings.php file for your site:
cd /path/to/drupal/sites/default # or /path/to/drupal/sites/mysite.com, as appropriate
$ drush status
In all of the cases above, if settings.php is in a folder called "default", then you do not need to specify the --uri component; you may, for example, cd /path/to/drupal followed by drush status, and the correct Drupal site will be found. If settings.php is not in a folder named 'default', then you will need to either specify --uri, or cd to the folder that contains the settings.php file.
Source

Answer 2

According to this message:
pm-update needs the following modules installed/enabled to run: update
Drush requires Update module to be enabled, so the following command should fix the problem:
drush -y en update