Drush for Google?

If you haven't heard of or used Drush it is a command line interface that allows you to do a lot of things with your drupal install.

For instance, the process of downloading and installing a new module involves:

1. Downloading the module
2. Unzipping and untarring the file
3. Uploading it to your server
4. Enabling the module

That is a lot of clicking with the mouse and switching back and forth between screens.

Using Drush, this can be accomplished by opening a terminal window or command line and typing drush dl modulename and then drush en modulename

As users of the command line know, the mouse sometimes can be a hindrance and adds extra steps.

This isn't an article about drush, but about Googlecl. It would be wrong to say that drush is the egg and googlecl is the chicken, since command-lines have been around well before either of them along with shell-scripts to automate repetitive tasks.

It seems lately though that more and more developers are returning to their roots by adding command-line options and features to cut down on the amount of clicking.

According to the Google Code site that houses googlecl, the following services are available now:

* Blogger

$ google blogger post --title "foo" "command line posting"

* Calendar

$ google calendar add "Lunch with Jim at noon tomorrow"

* Contacts

$ google contacts list name,email > contacts.csv

* Docs

$ google docs edit --title "Shopping list"

* Picasa

$ google picasa create --title "Cat Photos" ~/photos/cats/*.jpg

* Youtube

$ google youtube post --category Education killer_robots.avi

Another example from the manual, is displaying your day's calendar. Before googlecl, This would involve opening a web browser, typing the address for google calendar, and then logging in to your calendar using the web interface. This can also be accomplished now simply by typing google calendar today

Installing it seems rather simple too. Download it for your specific operating system from the site and install it per the instructions.

If you are using a mac, it is available for Macports. Be sure to update your ports first by running sudo port selfupdate My ports were out of date and didn't find googlecl the first time I tried to install it. Then type sudo port install googlecl Macports will automatically install googlecl, and any dependencies that are needed.

For your specific operating sytem, the Installation instructions are very helpful. As of this writing, it is available for Mac, Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD. A handy .deb package is available too for easy Ubuntu installation.

Expect more and more options and google applications to be accessible through googlecl as this evolves.