Drupal 8 — Dynamically updating pathauto URL

I recently came across the issue where I have article content type which can either be news or press release. In the content type, I have a select field to differenciate if it’s a news or press release. However based on the selection of news or press release, url should be dynamically generated. The URL for news should be /news/[node:title] and /press-release/[node:title].

Select field is something that I have created a while ago and which has machine name news and press.

I am using pathauto module to generate a URL alias and I don’t think I can dynamically created a URL , atleast I could not find a way to do it.

So here is what I did

function <module_name>_pathauto_alias_alter(&$alias, array &$context) {
  if ($context['bundle'] === 'article' && $context['op'] == 'insert') {
    /** @var \Drupal\node\Entity\Node $node */
    $node = $context['data']['node'];
    switch ($node->getType()) {
      case 'article':
        if (!empty($node->get('article_content_type')->getValue())) {
          $type = $node->get('article_content_type')->getValue();

          if ($type[0]['value'] === 'press') {
            $alias = str_replace('/news/', '/press-release/', $alias);
          }
        }
    }
  }
}

I used the hook provided pathauto module to get field value and check if value if press and replace the value to press-release.

Note that in order to execute this hook you must define the pattern in admin/config/search/path/patterns.

So this what pathauto pattern look like in UI.

References

The Path(auto) Less Traveled

Building more dynamic patterns with Pathauto

How to Alter Node URL Alias Based on Taxonomy Term in Drupal 8