Aug / 21 / 2010 / Speeding up local feature module development with features-fetch

Features-fetch (ff) is a simple drush command extension that simplifies deploying (rebuilt) Drupal Feature modules to a specific Drupal project.

Features are a collection of Drupal entities (like content types, views, contexts and imagecache presets) that taken together satisfy a certain use case. Developing a feature typically involves selecting the appropriate entities and downloading the custom feature module that the Features module generates.

You can modify a feature's entities (like add a display to a view) and update the feature module itself using the drush features-update command, but adding new components requires rebuilding and downloading the updated feature module. During the course of project development, you can end up rebuilding your feature modules quite a few times.

That is where features-fetch comes in. Instead performing the manual deployment steps over and over again, just run drush ff example_feature_module from within your Drupal project directory.

What it does:

  • Backs up any existing version of example_feature_module to DRUPALROOT/backups
  • Grabs the most recent example_feature_module.tar file from your downloads directory
  • unpacks it to your features destination directory

Current limitations:

  • uses machine wide config settings. Support for project specific settings is coming up
  • needs some code cleanup

Go ahead and grab it from the features-fetch github repo.