drush

I have several Drupal 5 Multisite installs. I was able to run "drush update -l www.example.com" on several of them successfully, but a few of the installs failed with "The command 'drush.php update' could not be executed."

Cryptic indeed.

There is a drush patch to provide more helpful error messages (http://drupal.org/node/449090).

but in my case it was just that the Drupal Core "Update Status" module wasn't enabled on the offending sites.

Troubleshooting the "Drush was not able to start (bootstrap) the Drupal database." when trying to run in on a localhost configuration.

Many thanks to Chris Wells from Redfin Solutions for this troubleshooting tip on getting drush to work in a localhost configuration.

In the settings.php file, try changing

$db_url = 'mysqli://username@localhost/example';
$db_prefix = '';
to
$db_url = 'mysqli://username@127.0.0.1/example';
$db_prefix = '';


comment #12 http://drupal.org/node/502252