Drupal 9 creating custom entities

3 min readMar 10, 2021

As a developer you get these requests to create projects in a framework so they can see if you fit their development team. I was asked, not so long ago, to create a headless CMS using Drupal 9, which meant creating a custom content entity type and use it via the Drupal JSON API module.

Since I haven’t touched Drupal in so many years, I had to read the Drupal docs to try understand how these modules work now and how to create them. It was a big nuisance, because their docs didn’t have a flow I could follow and their support forums have countless questions from other users with no real answers. So it was a dead end and made me question the usage of Drupal… But that’s a different story.

Finally I found some real help using their Drush CLI.

In this guide, I am using:
- macOS Big Sur 11.2.3
- PHP 7.4 (PHP 7.3 and up is required for Drupal 9)
- PHPStorm IDE
- Lando
- Composer

Get Drupal

You can get Drupal here https://www.drupal.org/download
Or get it using the DrupalComposer project:

composer create-project \
drupal-composer/drupal-project:9.x-dev \
drupal9 \
--prefer-dist \
--no-progress \
--no-interaction

Note: The downloaded version from drupal.org might not come with drush as a dependency so just add it in

composer require drush/drush

Lando init & start

Since I’m using Lando to containerise my projects, I’ll need to start it up. Obviously you can use your own tool such as MAMP, Laravel valet etc. So you can skip this part.

Initialise a Lando project:

cd drupal9
lando init

These are the options I chose using the Lando CLI

? From where should we get your app's codebase? current working directory? What recipe do you want to use? drupal9? Where is your webroot relative to the init destination? web? What do you want to call this app? drupal9

Start the Lando Project:

lando start

Drupal installation

Run through the Drupal CMS installation in the browser

Note: If you are using Lando, you can get your database info with this command

lando info

Create a custom Drupal entity type with drush

You can do a lot with the drush cli, so run lando drush help to see all the commands or go to https://www.drush.org/latest/commands/all/

Let’s create our entity type:

lando drush generate module-content-entityWelcome to module-content-entity generator!–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––Module name:➤ Something NewModule machine name [something_new]:➤...The following directories and files have been created or updated:–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––• modules/something_new/something_new.info.yml• modules/something_new/something_new.links.action.yml• modules/something_new/something_new.links.menu.yml• modules/something_new/something_new.links.task.yml• modules/something_new/something_new.permissions.yml• modules/something_new/something_new.routing.yml• modules/something_new/src/Entity/SomethingNew.php• modules/something_new/src/Form/SomethingNewForm.php• modules/something_new/src/Form/SomethingNewSettingsForm.php• modules/something_new/src/SomethingNewInterface.php• modules/something_new/src/SomethingNewListBuilder.php• modules/something_new/src/SomethingNewViewBuilder.php