How do I capture a page as HTML?

Question

I have a controller that generates a custom 500 page. I have set up a route at the path: '/500'. I would like to capture this as HTML and save as a static file, so that I don't need to bootstrap Drupal and run that controller when I return a custom 500 page.

I have been using this code:

  global $base_url;

  $contents = file_get_contents($base_url . "/500");

This works for me locally, but we have a lot of restrictions on our QA site so that file_get_contents is blocked.

Is there another way to render the entire page that this controller would return? For example, with the render service?

Also, I would want it in a logged-out context. I wouldn't want the admin toolbars, etc. to show up.

I found some code about subroutines. Is that a good way? I'm sure there's a way to use the Drupal render service to render a render array with the entire page. That sounds maybe the best way to do this?

Does anyone know how I might render the entire page programmatically?

I'm thinking in order to render the metadata and page classes based on a route, you're pretty much required to make a request.

There is another question about rendering parts of the page, but not the entire page.

Answer 1

If you bootstrap Drupal, you can just tell it to serve a particular page. Consider the content of index.php:

<?php
use Drupal\Core\DrupalKernel;
use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Request;
$autoloader = require_once 'autoload.php';

$kernel = new DrupalKernel('prod', $autoloader);

$request = Request::createFromGlobals();
$response = $kernel->handle($request);

If you replace the Request::createFromGlobals with a new Request(...), you can pass explicit values for the $_GET etc parameters. The function signature copied from Symfony is as follows:

/**
 * Constructor.
 *
 * @param array           $query      The GET parameters
 * @param array           $request    The POST parameters
 * @param array           $attributes The request attributes (parameters parsed from the PATH_INFO, ...)
 * @param array           $cookies    The COOKIE parameters
 * @param array           $files      The FILES parameters
 * @param array           $server     The SERVER parameters
 * @param string|resource $content    The raw body data
 */
public function __construct(array $query = array(), array $request = array(), array $attributes = array(), array $cookies = array(), array $files = array(), array $server = array(), $content = null)
{
    $this->initialize($query, $request, $attributes, $cookies, $files, $server, $content);
}

So your custom script could require the autoloader, bootstrap Drupal, create a fake Request object, tell Drupal to handle it, then save $response->getContent() to a file.