twig

Rendering Twig templates programmatically in Drupal 8

From time to time, I have the need to take a Twig template and a set of variables, render the template, replacing all the variables within, and then get the output as a string. For example, if I want to have a really simple email template in a custom module which has a variable for first_name, so I can customize the email before sending it via Drupal or PHP, I could do the following in Drupal 7:

Preserve the ability to Quick Edit nodes when theming node templates!

...aka, avoid the annoying Javascript error below:

drupal.js:67
TypeError: undefined is not an object (evaluating 'entityElement
      .get(0)
      .getAttribute')

Many themers working on Drupal 8 sites have Contextual menus and Quick Edit enabled (they're present in the Standard Drupal install profile, as well as popular profiles like Acquia's Lightning), and at some point during theme development, they notice that there are random and unhelpful fatal javascript errors—but they only appear for logged in administrators.

Eventually, they may realize that disabling the Contextual links module fixes the issue, so they do so and move along. Unfortunately, this means that content admins (who tend to love things like contextual links—at least when they work) and up not being able to hover over content to edit it.

There are two ways you can make things better without entirely disabling these handy modules: