Drupal reference

File layout, Drush command-line reference and cron for Drupal on TurboStack.

Reference for running Drupal on TurboStack: where the files live, the command-line tool, and the scheduled job. For setup see Deploy Drupal on TurboStack; for tuning see Drupal best practices.

File layout

Everything lives under your system user's home directory. ~ is that home directory (for example /var/www/prod/). Run every Drush command from ~/public_html.

Path What it is
~/public_html/ Drupal project root and web document root; run Drush from here
~/public_html/core/ Core framework
~/public_html/modules/ Contributed and custom modules
~/public_html/themes/ Themes
~/public_html/profiles/ Installation profiles
~/public_html/sites/ Site-specific configuration and files
~/public_html/sites/default/files/ Public uploads (must be writable)
~/public_html/vendor/ Composer dependencies
~/nginx/ Custom Nginx configuration

For ownership and permissions, see Application file layout and permissions. The uploads directory sites/default/files must be group-writable so uploads succeed, for example chmod -R 775 ~/public_html/sites/default/files.

Command-line reference

Drupal ships the Drush command-line interface (CLI) at drush. Run every command from ~/public_html. The common commands are below.

Command What it does
drush status Show the site status and environment details
drush cr Rebuild the cache
drush cron Run cron
drush updb Apply database updates
drush cex Export configuration
drush cim Import configuration
drush watchdog:show (alias drush ws) Show recent log messages

Manage dependencies with Composer from the project root:

cd ~/public_html && composer install
composer update

Make sure you set a supported PHP version and have installed all the PHP extensions Drupal requires before installing dependencies. On TurboStack the interpreter is /usr/bin/php<version> (for example /usr/bin/php8.3). If you need extra PHP modules, contact Support.

Clear caches at each layer with the TurboStack CLI (tscli):

Command What it clears
drush cr Drupal's own cache
tscli redis clear Redis cache (Redis must be configured)
tscli varnish clear Varnish full-page cache (works by default)
tscli nginx reload Reloads Nginx after config changes

Cron

Drupal relies on cron to run periodic tasks such as indexing content, sending emails, and cleaning up old log entries. Schedule Drupal cron with Drush rather than the web cron. Add a cron entry for your system user - for example every 15 minutes:

cron
*/15 * * * * cd ~/public_html && drush cron

Varnish integration

To cache pages for logged-in users and invalidate the cache by cache tag, the contributed Advanced Varnish module (adv_varnish) integrates Drupal with Varnish. Install it with Composer and use the latest release, which supports Drupal 9, 10 and 11:

composer require drupal/adv_varnish

The module ships its own Varnish configuration (VCL). On TurboStack the Varnish layer is managed, so coordinate a custom VCL through Support. See the module's project page.

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