Book Image

Drupal 9 Module Development - Third Edition

By : Daniel Sipos
Book Image

Drupal 9 Module Development - Third Edition

By: Daniel Sipos

Overview of this book

With its latest release, Drupal 9, the popular open source CMS platform has been updated with new functionalities for building complex Drupal apps with ease. This third edition of the Drupal Module Development guide covers these new Drupal features, helping you to stay on top of code deprecations and the changing architecture with every release. The book starts by introducing you to the Drupal 9 architecture and its subsystems before showing you how to create your first module with basic functionality. You’ll explore the Drupal logging and mailing systems, learn how to output data using the theme layer, and work with menus and links programmatically. Once you’ve understood the different kinds of data storage, this Drupal guide will demonstrate how to create custom entities and field types and leverage the Database API for lower-level database queries. You’ll also learn how to introduce JavaScript into your module, work with various file systems, and ensure that your code works on multilingual sites. Finally, you’ll work with Views, create automated tests for your functionality, and write secure code. By the end of the book, you’ll have learned how to develop custom modules that can provide solutions to complex business problems, and who knows, maybe you’ll even contribute to the Drupal community!
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
3
Chapter 3: Logging and Mailing

Private filesystem

The private filesystem is used whenever we want to control access to the files being downloaded. Using the default public storage, users can get to the files simply by pointing to them in the browser, thereby bypassing Drupal completely. However, .htaccess rules prevent users from directly accessing any files in the private storage, making it necessary to create a route that delivers the requested file. It goes without saying that the latter is a hell of a lot less performant, as Drupal needs to be loaded for each file. Therefore, it's important to only use it when files should be restricted based on certain criteria.

Drupal already comes with a route and Controller ready to download private files, but we can create one as well if we really need to. For example, the Image module does so in order to control the creation and download of image styles—ImageStyleDownloadController.

The route definition for the default Drupal path looks like this:

...