howto - programmatically create roles in drupal 6

I've been using drupal for about 4 solid months now. I pretty much made it through the learnng curve. I've stumbled upon some things that may be valuable to the community.

Surprisingly there seems to be an absence of material relating creating things programatically in drupal, such as roles, permissions and install profiles.

After looking for material related to programmatically creating roles in drupal and coming up with nothing, I had to resort to running the drupal code through the debugger and decipher how to do things programatically.

This little post explain how to programmatically create roles in drupal without directly touching the database and letting drupal take care of all the dirty work

The following code creates a new role in drupal.

here is an explanation of the code above.

We are basically mimicking the "Add new role" form that is available to the administrator of the site. This is done by filling in values and running the form. We need to do this because the code that creates the the new role is in the submit handler of the form. see user_admin_role_submit()

require_once(drupal_get_path('module', 'user') . "/user.admin.inc");

we need the above line of code to load the proper file that contains the callbacks for the form, which is not necessarily loaded.

$form_id = "user_admin_new_role";
You need to name the form as follows. even though there are no direct handlers for such a form , the users_forms() function takes care of that for us.

$form_values = array();
$form_values["name"] = "new role";
$form_values["op"] = t('Add role');
$form_state = array();
$form_state["values"] = $form_values;

the above code fills in the form values.

you must use the t() function for
$form_values["op"] = t('Add role');
or the form wont be processed

drupal_execute($form_id, $form_state);

we then execute the form.

This all works fine and dandy when it is executed in a script or whatever, however when I ran the code during an installation of a module, it would stop working, the form handlers were never called.

After spending hours running through the code again and again I realized that the the form is generated based on the the URL. or $_GET['q'] value. see user_admin_role()
I don't know if this was done this way for a specific purpose but I hope in the next release the developers can give is either a function to directly create roles or not generate the form based on the url.

Anyways to circumvent this issue just swap the code for the following

If you want to find out what the role ID is of the role you just created, I use the following to get the trick done.