Develop
Create a module

Create a Drupal module

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Section under construction.

About code scaffolding

There are a few projects that can help you to create a module, like Module Builder (opens in a new tab) that will scaffold most of the boilerplate code for you, or Examples for Developers (opens in a new tab), code that you can moslty copy and paste and trust that this is a good reference to start with.

CLI tools

drush generate command (opens in a new tab) is based on the drupal-code-generator (opens in a new tab) project.

Drupal Console (opens in a new tab) is a great tool that helped Drupal 8 developers in many ways, but it's now deprecated (opens in a new tab), mostly in favor of Drush. If you are moving from Console to Drush, Dieter Holvoet did a comparison of commands (opens in a new tab).

Make also sure to review the other Developer Experience related projects.

Here we will cover the basics of creating a module from scratch.

The minimal requirements

  • A directory with the name of the module (e.g. my_module)
  • Usually created in modules/custom
  • A .info.yml file with the name of the module (e.g. my_module.info.yml)
  • The .module file is optional, but usually present to implement hooks and other global functions (e.g. my_module.module)

.info.yml structure

name: My module
type: module
description: 'A description of my module'
core_version_requirement: ^9 || ^10
package: Custom
configure: my_module.settings
dependencies:
  - drupal:node
  - other_module:other_module

Now let's cover how a module can be structured. We won't cover all the possibilities, just the most common ones.

Module files

We just met these two files:

  • my_module.info.yml
  • my_module.module

Other files that can be present:

  • my_module.routing.yml - Routes definitions
  • my_module.services.yml - Service, event subscribers, etc. definitions
  • my_module.libraries.yml - Define libraries (css, js)
  • my_module.install - Install, update and uninstall hooks (create, update, delete tables or configuration)
  • my_module.post_update.php - Post update hooks
  • my_module.api.php - Define hooks to be used by other modules
  • my_module.permissions.yml - Define permissions
  • my_module.links.menu.yml - Define menu links, e.g. in the admin menu
  • my_module.links.task.yml - Define task links, e.g. a tab on the node edit form
  • my_module.links.action.yml - Define action links, e.g. a link to delete a node
  • my_module.links.contextual.yml - Define contextual links, e.g. a link to edit a node from the teaser

Module directories

src directory is used for PSR-4 autoloading, so we can store classes there.

  • my_module/src - PHP classes, like services or plugins
  • my_module/src/Controller - Controllers defined in the .routing.yml file
  • my_module/src/Form - Forms defined in the .routing.yml file
  • my_module/src/Entity - Custom entity classes
  • my_module/src/EventSubscriber - Event subscribers defined in the .services.yml file
  • my_module/src/Plugin - Plugins

Other directories

  • my_module/templates - Twig templates
  • my_module/config/install - Configuration files to be installed
  • my_module/config/schema - Schema files to define configuration
  • my_module/tests - Unit, Kernel and Functional tests, test modules

Add libraries: CSS and JS

Adding assets (CSS, JS) to a Drupal module via *.libraries.yml (opens in a new tab) - Drupal.org

Read more

Creating modules (opens in a new tab) - Drupal.org

Development conceptsCreate a theme