Drupal Console

Drupal Console is a new shiny thing in Drupal - a Command Line Interface (CLI) built for Drupal 8, similar to Drush, used to do tasks like rebuild caches, install modules, and generate boilerplate code for module development. It's the latter that I'm focusing on at the moment while I learn Drupal 8.

Create a custom module

So to create my first generated module I need to do the following command:

drupal generate:module

This takes me through a few questions to answer before generating the files and then I'm left with my new module folder and the files:

• module_name.info.yml
• module_name.module

Next I need to install the module with the command:

drupal module:install module_name

Create a custom page

Drupal 8 uses routes and controllers to display custom pages. That means you need to have a routing.yml file that handles routing (this replaces hook_menu() used in Drupal 7), and a controller class that handles the code to display the page (this replaces the page callback function used in Drupal 7). The controller class uses the PSR-4 naming standard so it needs to be inside a specific directory structure. Drupal Console handles all of this for us automagically. So to create a 'hello' page we do the command:

drupal generate:controller

Again I'm asked a series of questions:

Enter the module name: module_name
Enter the Controller class name: HelloController
Enter the Controller method title (leave empty and press enter when done): Hello Controller
Enter the action method name: hello
Enter the route path: /hello
Enter the Controller method title (leave empty and press enter when done): (empty)
Do you want to generate a unit test class (yes/no): no
Do you want to load services from the container (yes/no): no
Do you confirm generation? (yes/no): yes

And in my module I can now see the module_name.routing.yml file with the controller class generated in the correct directory structure

Although I'm just scratching the surface of Drupal Console, I can already see that this is going to save me a lot of time when developing in Drupal 8.

Note: Sometimes I'd have a problem using Drupal Console and get the error Call to undefined method escapeTrailingBackslash(). The fix is here.

Drupal Console Commands