From Request to Response: A Journey into Drupal 8 Internals

In the first article on Drupal 8 module development we looked a bit at the routing aspect of this process. We’ve seen that creating pages with paths is now a matter of declaring routes that match up with controllers. The latter, as we’ve seen, can return a render array that gets interpreted into markup and displayed in the main content area of that page. However, did you know that under the hood, Drupal actually transforms that array into a Response object according to the dictates of Symfony’s HTTPKernelInterface?

drupal8wide

In this article, I would like us to go deeper into the internals of Drupal 8 (and Symfony2) and look at what actually happens (and can happen) from the moment a request is made by a user to the one in which they see something returned in response. The example I mentioned above is just one direction this process can go in, and today we are also going to see other possibilities. The goal is to understand the flexibility of the system which in turn can help us build awesome applications.

Before going into it, I strongly recommend you check out this diagram which does an amazing job at synthesizing what is often referred to as the render pipeline. Though in my opinion it represents more than the name implies because the render system is only part of what’s depicted, albeit a big one.

Front controller (index.php)

It’s no secret that Symfony2 is now an important part of Drupal. The latter uses many of Symfony’s components, most importantly for this article the HTTPKernel and HTTPFoundation ones. Together they are responsible for encapsulating a user request, passing it to the application and then returning whatever comes back to the user in a consistent and OO way.

The HTTPKernelInterface (something you probably heard about also from other contexts) is what glues all of this together by taking in a Request object and always returning a Response one. A very simple but powerful concept.

This process is initiated inside the index.php file which starts by generating said Request object and passing it to the HTTPKernel::handle() method. The latter is then responsible for returning a Response object. At a high level, this is what happens both in a Drupal application as well as in a Symfony one (or any other that leverages the HTTPKernel component).

HTTPKernel and events

HTTPKernel is the heart of any Symfony based application. Its handle() method, as we saw, has a great deal of responsibility in preparing a response and it does so in a workflow driven by events. This makes for a very flexible application where the heavy lifting is always delegated to listeners of these events.

It starts with the first event called kernel.request. Subscribers to this event handle various tasks. But two very important ones in Drupal 8 are the format negotiation and routing. The first determines the type of response that needs to be returned (html, json, image, pdf, etc) while the second determines what the code responsible for handling this is (the _controller key of a route definition inside the routing.yml file). But like in most steps in this event workflow, if a listener returns a response object, the process skips most of the further steps (stops propagation) and goes straight to kernel.response.

symfony event workflow