Entity Usage 5.0 Adds Drupal 12 Support, Requires Usage Data Rebuild

Teams preparing Drupal sites for Drupal 12 now have a stable Entity Usage branch that supports the new core major. Released on 15 September 2026, Entity Usage 5.0.0 is the first stable release of the 5.x line and requires sites upgrading from 8.x-2.x to rebuild all usage data. The release notes also state that the 2.x branch will not receive Drupal 12 support.

The rebuild makes the move to 5.x more than a routine dependency update for sites with large usage tables. Entity Usage 5.0 changes how paragraphs, revisions, and inline entities are tracked and also changes indexes on the entity_usage table. Teams with substantial content estates may therefore need to test the operation and account for its runtime and database impact in their deployment planning.

The release also creates a branch choice tied to the Drupal core version in use. Entity Usage 2.3, released on the same day, supports Drupal 10.3 and Drupal 11, while 5.0 requires Drupal 11.4 or later and provides the Drupal 12-compatible line. Drupal 11.4 sites can use either supported branch, while sites on Drupal 10 or earlier Drupal 11 releases cannot move to 5.0.

Sites moving from 2.x to 5.x must rebuild all recorded usage relationships with drush entity-usage:recreate. Alongside the tracking and index changes, the 5.x line disables entity revision caching during bulk updates and changes how large usage listings are processed to reduce memory use and improve performance. Those improvements do not remove the requirement to recreate the usage data after the branch upgrade.

Custom tracking plugins may also require code changes before a site can move to 5.x. Entity Usage 5.0 removes support for annotation-based EntityUsageTrack plugins and uses PHP attributes instead. Attribute support had already been introduced in the 2.x branch, giving maintainers a migration path before adopting 5.x.

Testing recorded in the issue queue shows why the rebuild may need separate deployment planning on large sites. One test on a site with more than 10 million rows in the Entity Usage table reduced total index size from about 4,709.97 MB to 2,365.72 MB, while another tester reported a rebuild lasting approximately two hours and an index reduction from 5,080 MB to 1,451.84 MB. These are individual test results and do not establish expected rebuild times or storage reductions for other sites.

Entity Usage 2.3 also includes a correction for the rebuild process. The release fixes a failure mode in which rows from a failed bulk-rebuild chunk could be replayed into later chunks, causing duplicate-key errors and multi-gigabyte watchdog entries. The correction is included in the current 2.3 release, while the 5.x line incorporates the associated rebuild work as part of its newer implementation.

Entity Usage tracks relationships between Drupal entities so site teams can identify where content is referenced and can protect referenced content from deletion. The project supports relationships involving nodes, media, taxonomy terms, link fields, embedded entities, Entity Reference Revisions, and Layout Builder content. Drupal.org currently reports 65,784 sites using the module, a reporting figure that should not be treated as either a total installation count or the number of sites expected to move to 5.x.

Neither 5.0.0 nor 2.3 is identified as a security release. Teams planning Drupal 12 need the 5.x line and should review custom tracking plugins before scheduling the required usage-data rebuild. Sites remaining on Drupal 10.3 or Drupal 11 can continue using the 2.3 branch within its stated compatibility range.