Install Drupal Modules from a Linux Shell

If you are running on a typical LAMP install with access to the shell or SSH, you can easily install drupal modules with 3 or 4 commands.  Find the link to the project download.  For this example we will use the tar.gz download.

Assuming you are in your root Drupal Install Dir.

cd sites/all/modules
wget http://www.drupal.org/modules/<projectname>.tar.gz
tar -xzf *.gz
rm *.gz

You will need to do this one project at a time as the tar command will choke on more than one .gz at a time.

If you want to upload multiple files and extract at once use this command:

for file in *.tar.gz; do tar -xzf "${file}"; done
rm *.gz

This will loop through each one and then be sure to remove all the gz files when you are done.

The last step is to enable them in site's modules management page.