Beginning Drupal 8

Chapter 12 ■ Anatomy of a Module
The following line is the last half of the call from our router (HelloController:sayhello). The line of
code defines the function that will return the information back to the page that is displayed when the visitor
accesses the /hello URL on our site.
public function sayhello() {
The remaining code simply calls the function we created in our module file hello_hello_world(). This
function returns the text “Hello Drupal 8 World!” in a renderable array that Drupal knows how to display on
a page, and returns it back to our modules router.
return array(
'#markup' => hello_hello_world(),
);
Save this file, and we’re ready to enable our new module! Visit the Extend page in the admin section of
the site and scroll down until you see the Awesome Modules section (see Figure 12-2).
Figure 12-2. Our Hello Drupal 8 World! module on the Extend page
Check the box next to the module’s name and click the “Save configuration” button to enable the module.
With the module enabled, you’re now ready to test your first Drupal 8 module! To execute the module, navigate
to your homepage and add /hello to the end of the URL (we defined that path in our module’s routing file).
You should see the output shown earlier in Figure 12-1.
Other Module Files
Our Hello module is a very simple module, the purpose being to help you past the initial learning curve of
how a module is structured in Drupal. Now that you know the very basics, you can look at other contributed
modules, or even Drupal core, to see how more complex modules are created and study the files associated
with that increased complexity. You can learn about writing more complex modules at www.drupal.org/
developing/modules/8. I highly recommend downloading the Examples module from www.drupal.org/
project/examples. Within that module you will find several examples that demonstrate how Drupal 8
modules are constructed, a great starting place for creating Drupal 8 modules.
Summary
Congratulations! You have written a Drupal 8 module and earned your first stripe toward becoming a Drupal
module developer ninja. The purpose of this chapter was to give you an overview so you would have enough
information under your belt to go exploring through other modules. While the learning curve can be steep
for Drupal module development, you’ve taken the first step along that path
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