Programmatically create a new node from an existing NID

Question

Essentially I want to take a node and duplicate it. Take a node ID and programmatically create a copy of the node.
I want to be able to edit the newly created node, and maintain the data on the old node.

Answer 1

On entities, you can use is_new to signify a new entity to save, but you still need to unset nid (iirc), vid, and tnid manually. This saves unsetting log.

$new = clone $node;
$new->is_new = true;
unset($new->nid);
unset($new->vid);
unset($new->tnid);
node_save($new);

Interestingly, the node_clone module incorrectly sets the properties to null, which is significant for databases that support NULL and DEFAULT separately (e.g. PostgreSQL).

Answer 2

You may be happy with the replicate module which provides an API to do just that for any entity.

As stated in its README file (You'll find more in it) :

Very basic usage example:

/**
 * Replicate Basic test function.
 *
 * In this example we will suppose that there is a node with nid = 1 we want
 * to replicate.
 */
function replicate_test_function() {
  // Load a newly created node as an entity.
  $entity = array_shift(entity_load('node', array(1)));

  // Duplicate the entity and save the replica.
  replicate_entity('node', $entity);

  // You can use replicate_clone_entity() instead, alter the replica afterward
  // and manually save the entity, but if you want to implement a generic
  // code like adding ' [Replicate]' to the end of every replicated node title,
  // use the API hook hook_replicate_entity_ENTITY_TYPE().
}

Answer 3

You can load your node with node_load() and unset the nid and vid and then save the new node with node_save()

  $nid = 4;
  $node = node_load($nid);
  $new_node = $node;
  unset($new_node->nid);
  unset($new_node->vid);
  node_save($new_node);