Drush and Drush Make are two great utilities for folks who use Drupal.
Here's how to setup and use Drush Make :
Create a ~/.drush directory and download Drush Make to there :
$ cd $ mkdir .drush $ cd .drush $ wget http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/drush_make-6.x-2.0-beta6.tar.gz $ tar -xvzf drush_make-6.x-2.0-beta6.tar.gz $ cd /var/www/yoursite $ cat makeYourWebSite.txt core = 7.x projects[] = drupal $ drush make makeYourWebSite.txt
Note, however, there currently appears to be a limitation in Drush Make that makes it difficult to work with Drupal alpha versions. This seems to have been fixed in commit358186, but when I tried to download the HEAD version of Drush Make I didn't see any files.
