Drush Output Formats

Some Drush commands produce output that may be rendered in a variety of different ways using a pluggable formatting system. Drush commands that support output formats will show a --format option in their help text. The available formats are also listed in the help text, along with the default value for the format option. The list of values shown is abreviated; to see the complete list of available formats, run the help command with the --verbose option.

The --pipe option is equivalent to using --format=<pipe-format>; note that pipe format varies by command. The pipe format will be shown in the options section of the command help, under the --pipe option. For historic reasons, --pipe also hides all log messages.

To best understand how the various Drush output formatters work, it is best to first look at the ouput of the command using the 'export' format. This will show the result of the command using the exact structure that was built by the command, without any reformatting. This is the "standard format" for the Drush command. Different formatters will take this information and present it in different ways.

Output Formats

A list of available formats, and their affect on the output of certain Drush commands, is shown below.