So say you're new to Drupal and have been playing around a bit. You've been exploring the modules and themes available and you're excited about all the possible ideas you might implement. You're deep into the experimentation phase here and time is of the essence! Decompressing the Drupal package for a new site, setting up a sandbox like with LAMP (or MAMP, or XAMPP), and finally configuring the database running the install script takes several minutes and is highly repetitive. Even after setting up a core install there are many common modules like Views, Ctools, or Panels that you need to download, unpack, and enable. How daunting! Is there any way to script things like this so you can get down to work?

Quickstart/Drush to the rescue

One of my first projects at Arts & Sciences Computing Services was to work on the Video project. This project was, most basically, a YouTube clone that would allow the college to encode, store, and serve up public and private (copyrighted) video content thereby having complete control of its use, availability, etc. The current implementation was in C# in ASP.Net using FFMPEG to do encoding and some other libraries to handle authentication and file management.

Since I this was my first experience with C#, and more so ASP.Net, I didn't get to make a large impact (or even a tiny dent) on the Video project before a separate project took precedence and I started working with Drupal (Hint: you’re currently looking at said project). It wasn’t long I was wrapped up in writing modules and tweaking Drupal to do our bidding. The Video project was almost out of mind, in fact, until I started researching Drupal's Media module for use on yet another project.

Media module