Out of the box, Drupal offers only a single type of validation for fields; required or not required. For most use cases this is fine, however, it can be a little difficult to define your own custom validation logic. What if you need to validate a field value and make sure it's unique?

The Field validation module allows you to define custom validation rules using Drupal's administration interface. The module ships with a lot of its own validators: "Plain text", "Specific value(s)" and much more.

If none of the validators meet your requirement, you can write your own by implementing a validator plugin. Because validators are Ctools plugin, they are easy to maintain as each one gets its own file.

In this tutorial, we'll use Field validation to validate a field value and make sure it's unique.