Module Development

An Overview of the Devel Module for Drupal 7

This page is archived

We're keeping this page up as a courtesy to folks who may need to refer to old instructions. We don't plan to update this page.

Alternate resources

Sprout Video

This video walks through the handy devel module from http://drupal.org/project/devel and demonstrates the tools it provides for debugging, inspecting and analyzing the code and SQL queries happening on your site. In this video you'll also learn about some of the helper functions built into the devel module that make it simpler to inspect the large nested arrays that you'll commonly come across when writing code for Drupal.

You may not have heard of the function dsm() before now. It is a legacy function and dpm() is the newer name. The two functions are identical since dsm() is just a wrapper for dpm().
The idea is that dsm() was a poor name for the function, it's short for drupal set message, but what was later decided that drupal print (as in print_r) message was better.

The difference between those two and kpr() is that dpm() does a permissions check to make sure the current user has permission to view devel's output, and then puts the krumo'd variable dump into the message queue via drupal_set_message(). This means that dpm() will work and let you see the output even if you're redirected. Great for debugging forms. kpr() just krumo's and dumps the value right here, right now. No permission check, no regard for where the content is being spit out.