Drupal has always had excellent support for human-friendly URL’s and SEO in general, from early on we have had the luxury of modules like pathauto offering options to update URL for specific entities, token support and bulk update of URLs. Though bulk update works for most cases, there are some situations where we have to update URLs programmatically, some of the use cases are:
In Drupal 8 Pathauto services.yml file we can see that there is a service named ‘pathauto.generator’ which is what we would need. The class for corresponding to this service, PathautoGenerator provides updateEntityAlias method which is what we would be using here:
Now all we need is to loop the entities through this function, these entities may be the user, taxonomy_term or node. We will be using entityQuery and entityTypeManager to load entities, similar to the code below
This works fine and could be used on a small site but considering the real world scenarios we generally perform this type of one-time operation in hook_update_N() and for larger sites, we may have memory issues, which we can resolve by involving batch API to run the updates in the batch.
Using Batch API in hook_update_n()
As the update process in itself a batch process, so we can’t just use batch_set() to execute our batch process for URL alias update, we need to break the task into smaller chunks and use the $sandbox variable which is passed by reference to update function to track the progress.
The whole process could be broken down into 4 steps:
The process of loading the entities will differ in case we are just updating a single entity type say nodes. In that case, we can use loadMultiple to load all the entities at once per single batch operation. That’s a kind of trade-off we have to do according to our requirements. The crucial part is using sandbox variable and splitting the job into chunks for batch processing.