EXPORT and IMPORT Drupal DATABASE with DRUSH command

Drush is the ultimate tool and companion for Drupal and it does a great job in situations where we want to import or export our Drupal database with sql-cli and sql-dump commands.

Below is the detail of how to use Drush to import and export the database.

 

Run "drush sql-cli" to Import Drupal database

Drush command "drush sql-cli" can be used to import a database from an SQL dump file to a Drupal database.

Make sure to use the sql-drop command to drop the current database first and then run the sql-cli command to import data to Drupal's current database.

drush sql-drop -y
drush sql-cli < ~/path/to/db-file.sql

 

Run "drush sql-dump" to Export Drupal database

The best way to export or download the Drupal database is first to rebuild/clear the cache and then export the database with the "drush sql-dump" command.

1. First clear the cache

To export the Drupal database, the first step is to rebuild your cache before the database export

drush cr // For Drupal 8 and above
drush cc // For Drupal 6 & 7

Clearing the cache first will empty the cache tables in the database and significantly decrease the database size.

2. Now export the database with sql-dump command

Now run the drush sql-dump command with the destination argument to export the Drupal database to the desired destination. This will dump the database into a gzip file without cache table content.

drush sql-dump --gzip --result-file=/path/to/db-file.sql

 

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