Drush live

The Drush live CLI allows you to run Drush commands on an already fully-bootstrapped Drush/Drupal site. Essentially it is a Drush command which waits for input and tries to interpret that input as drush commands.

How?

Start up the Drush live CLI with the following commands:

  drush dl drush_live
  drush @myalias live
  DrushLive@myalias>

This fully bootstraps Drupal at the given @aliasname and waits for drush commands to run. Type '?' on the prompt for more help.

Why?

To be able to run Drush commands instantly without having to wait for Drush/Drupal to bootstrap.

Limitations

1. The CLI itself is a very basic PHP implementation so it lacks everything that makes your Bash/Zsh CLI nice. Like the ability to use the arrow keys.
2. It can only run Drush commands - arbitrary bash will not work.
3. Although any Drush command *should* work - in reality Drush was not designed to have multiple commands run in the same instance/bootstrap of Drush/Drupal. All sorts of problems are likely to arise to do with static caching when trying to run a lot of heavy-duty commands.

Note, these limitations can be circumvented by creative use of the --auto-reload option.

OK...give me one use case

The use case I had in mind when writing it was to create an awesome and fast live-reload workflow for javascript and css development using the following tools (in roughly the following order when you make a change to a file):
1. guard
2. guard-drush (running drush live to make the response time as fast as possible!)
3. Prepro module (having created a drush command for it)
4. Sassy & Coffeescript modules
5. guard
6. guard-livereload
7. LiveReload browser extension

Advanced usage

Type '?' on the prompt for more details.

Branches & releases

The two branches of development are in accord with the two currently supported major versions of Drush. Do pick the right one:

• Drush 4.x: Down load Drush live 7.x-4.x
• Drush 5.x: Down load Drush live 7.x-5.x