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This tutorial is built using Drupal 8.0. The fundamental concepts of Drupal 8 - like services & routing - are still valid, but newer versions of Drupal *do* have major differences.
Configuring a New Service
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Login SubscribeThe service container is the magician's hat of Drupal: it's full of useful objects, I mean "services" - we're trying to sound sophisticated. By default, the container is filled will cool stuff, like a logger factory, a translator, a white rabbit and a database connection, just to name a few.
List All Services
Head over to the terminal and run a new Drupal Console command:
drupal container:debug
This prints every single service in the container: over 400 tools that we have access to out-of-the-box. The nickname of each service is on the left: you'll use that to get that service. On the right, it tells you what type of object this will be.
Most of the services here you won't need to use directly: some like cron, database, file_system and a few other ones might be really useful to you.
The module_name.services.yml File
Before we get into how to use these services, I want to add our RoarGenerator to the service container. This means that instead of instantiating it directly, we'll teach Drupal's container how to instantiate the RoarGenerator for us. Then we'll ask the container for the "roar generator" and it will create it for us.
Why would you do this? Hold that thought: you'll see the benefits soon.
To register a service, go to the root of your module and create a dino_roar.services.yml file. Inside, start with a services key:
| services: | |
| // ... lines 2 - 4 |
In order for the container to create the RoarGenerator for us, it needs to know two things: what's your spirit animal and your favorite color.
Scratch that: the first thing it needs to know is what "nickname" to use for the service. This can be anything, how about dino_roar.roar_generator:
| services: | |
| dino_roar.roar_generator: | |
| // ... lines 3 - 4 |
The only rule is that this needs to be unique in your project and use lowercase and alphanumeric characters with exceptions for _ and ..
The second thing the container needs to know is class for the service. To tell it, add a class key below the nickname and type RoarGenerator:
| services: | |
| dino_roar.roar_generator: | |
| class: Drupal\dino_roar\Jurassic\RoarGenerator |
I'll hit tab because I'm super lazy and PhpStorm isn't. It gives me the fully qualified namespace. Thanks Storm!
Go to the terminal and rebuild the cache:
drupal cache:rebuild
Now run container:debug and pipe it into grep for "dino":
drupal container:debug | grep dino
There it is! It's nickname is dino_roar.roar_generator and it'll give us a RoarGenerator object. Yay! Um, but what now? How can we get that service from the container? Actually, I have no idea. I'm kidding - next chapter!
