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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.

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03.

The Drupal Console & Route Cache

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The Drupal Console!

Google for a new utility called "Drupal Console". This is a fantastic console script that helps you debug, clear cache and generate code. If you love it, you should say thank you to Jesus Olivas and others for their work! It's a bit like Drush, but different, but kind of the same... I don't know. They seem to be co-existing and don't do the exact same things.

To download it, copy the curl statement and run that in your terminal. Next, move it into a global bin directory so that you can simply type drupal from anywhere in the terminal:

curl https://drupalconsole.com/installer -L -o drupal.phar
mv drupal.phar /usr/local/bin/drupal
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/drupal
drupal

Tip

If you're on windows, use the readfile line and don't worry about moving the file into a bin/ directory. Instead, you can type php drupal.phar to run the drupal.phar file that is downloaded.

Hello Drupal Console! Now try drupal list:

drupal list

This shows a huge list of all of the commands you can run. There is a lot of really good stuff in here - we'll cover some of these in this tutorial.

Clearing the Routing Cache

One of those commands is router:rebuild. Run that to clear the routing cache:

drupal router:rebuild

Ok, go back, refresh and congratulations!!! Seriously: you've just created your first custom page in Drupal 8. By the way, creating a page in the Symfony framework looks almost exactly the same. You're mastering two tools at once! You deserve a vacation.

Notice this page is literally only the text "ROOOOAR". It doesn't have any theming or templates applied to it. We will tap into the theme system later, but this is really interesting: if you want to return a Response all by yourself, you can do that and Drupal won't mess with it. Hey, this could even be a JSON response for an API. Drupal is a CMS, but it's also a modern, custom-development framework.