Getting a node (or other entity) and playing with it on the command line

Here's one way to get a node so that you can play with it on the command line and figure out what different methods actually do:

array_pop(\Drupal::service('entity_type.manager')->getStorage('node')->loadByProperties(['title' => 'Sample node']))

There's surely faster ways to do it with an ID, and maybe even better would be to use devel generate here. Anyway, this gives a node that can be messed with, like so, putting it all together:

drush ev "print array_pop(\Drupal::service('entity_type.manager')->getStorage('node')->loadByProperties(['title' => 'Sample poster']))->toUrl()->setAbsolute()->toString();"

That's how i got from toUrl() failing because it returns an object, to both returning a string and an absolute path.

The methods to try i'm getting from the API documentation, in this case https://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/core%21lib%21Drupal%21Core%21Url.php/class/Url/8.2.x

A better command line shell interface for Drupal must be coming (right Console?) with autocompletion and such but for now we still have Drush eval and the docs.