Tuesday, August 28, 2012

PHP Settings for Drush in OSX

Drush has been testing me...

Faced with the Fatal error: Allowed memory size of millions of bytes exhausted (tried to allocate a couple of bytes) message on practically every conceivable Drush operation, thought it was time to invest in my dev environment to sort my Mac out...

Turns out that the php.ini file used by your local web server is different to the one Drush uses on the command line. My local development server usually runs with memory_limit=512M (although hosted sites usually run with 256M or less).

To find out which version of PHP Drush uses, drush status may help. However, which php may give you the best answer: if it's /usr/bin/php and your Drush status PHP Configuration is blank, chances are PHP is running with a miniscule amount of memory resource for CLI-issued commands. In which case you need a new php.ini file in your /etc folder to give Drush more beef. There are already default ones in this folder, so just copy one of these and edit.

cd /etc 
sudo cp php.ini.default php.ini 
sudo chmod 666 php.ini 

Then edit your new php.ini file and set memory_limit=512M in the php.ini file.

If you need more help on understanding what php.ini is all about, there's a useful article at http://drupal.org/node/207036 and explains the various tweaks to help Drupal and Drush work well. Please note, not all hosting providers will allow you to adjust php.ini, especially the cheaper, shared hosting accounts.

No comments:

Post a Comment