Replace Standard Node Path in Drupal 8

Question

I am still new to all the Symfony semantics. What would be the easiest way to change node canonical urls to be /article/[node-title] instead of /node/[node-id]? Following this documentation I tried the code (which I expected to produce at least a url structure like /article/[node-id])

<?php
/**
 * @file
 * Contains \Drupal\example\Routing\ExampleRoutes.
 */

namespace Drupal\example\Routing;
use Symfony\Component\Routing\Route;
/**
 * Defines dynamic routes.
 */
class ExampleRoutes {

  /**
   * {@inheritdoc}
   */
  public function routes() {
    $routes = array();
    // Declares a single route under the name 'example.content'.
    // Returns an array of Route objects. 
    $routes['entity.node.canonical'] = new Route(
      // Path to attach this route to:
      '/article/{node}',
      // Route defaults:
      array(
        '_controller' => '\Drupal\node\Controller\NodeViewController::view',
        '_title' => 'Hello'
      ),
      // Route requirements:
      array(
        '_permission'  => 'access content',
      )
    );
    return $routes;
  }

}
?>

But unfortunately it is not changing anything…

Answer 1

While theoretically now supported, that is not possible not like this.

You can not reliable load a node based on the node title, it is not guaranteed to be unique, and to become a practical URL, a number of replacements should be made, like replacing spaces, lowercasing it and so on.

Use the path alias system for this, just like in Drupal 7. We're maintaining an inofficial port of the pathauto module, that allows you to configure token patterns to automatically generate an alias for each node. You also need token.module, which you can get from here.