Remote alias on OVH shared hosting

This is how I managed to execute drush @mysite status on OVH shared hosting server.

My alias

$aliases['mysite'] = array(
   'uri' => 'mysite.tld',
   'root' => '/path/to/home/apps/drupal-6',
   'db-url' => 'mysqli://user:password@server/db',
   'remote-host' => 'premium.ovh.net',
   'remote-user' => 'user',
   'path-aliases'  => array(
     '%drush'  => '/path/to/home/apps/drush',
   )
);

What I tried

Add symbolic link to drush in $PATH
Don't work I have no write access to any of the PATH folders (/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/bin/X11:/usr/games)

Make drush availabe in PATH
In .bashrc I have added

export PATH=$PATH:/path/to/home/apps/drush

drush @mysite status
Your command line PHP installation is too old. Drush requires at least PHP 5.2.0

Here I realized that "php" runs PHP 4.4.9, and for PHP5 the executable is "php.ORIG.5" .

Make alias to drush in .bashrc

alias drush='php.ORIG.5 /path/to/home/apps/drush/drush.php'

drush @mysite status
The command could not be executed successfully (returned: ovh_ssh: drush: command not found, code: 127)

After couple of hours of research I found that at aliases don't get expanded in non interactive shells. SSH remote commands are run in noninteractive mode so the aliases are not available.

Solution

Add function drush in .bashrc

function drush ()
{
  php.ORIG.5 /path/to/home/apps/drush/drush.php $@
} 

Just before

# If not running interactively, don't do anything
[ -z "$PS1" ] && return

With function I can specify the PHP executable and make the command available in noninteractive shell.

This solution is valid on shared hosting servers where all these apply :

• User can't create symbolic link to drush in $PATH (for OVH /usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/bin/X11:/usr/games)
• User can't create alias because they don't get expanded in noninteractive mode
• Server has some exotic name for PHP 5 executable

Hope this can help improve the README.txt for drush.