Is there a way to install Drupal from bash script without using Drush?

Question

Looking for relatively easy way to install Drupal instance from command line without using Drush. I want just to use installing script and archive of custom modules to install Drupal on customer's server (it may not have Drush installed).

Answer 1

You can install Drupal and additional modules and themes without Drush. It's just a sequence of UNIX commands, like wget, tar xzf, cat. You can even write a Makefile and use GNU make to deploy a website. But you don't want to do it (unless you have huge amounts of spare time at your diplosal). Drush provides a lot of best practices and convenience layers to bootstrap and deploy a Drupal installation.

The only reason not to use Drush is, when your server is only reachable via FTP. But then I would do drush make or all the drush dl on my local box and upload the resulting folder structure to the server.

Use Drush. ;)