Provide an API function to fetch an Entity by machine name

This is an awesome idea. Actually, we are using this in our very dependent code in our custom module. It will be great to become generic and view integrated function.

It's hard to make a generic API function for this because you need to do an EntityFieldQuery but you need to know the field name. The API as such would just be a thin wrapper around something that looks like this:

  $query = new EntityFieldQuery();
  $result = $query->entityCondition('entity_type', 'node', '=')
    ->fieldCondition('field_machine_name', 'value', $machinename, '=')
    ->execute();
  return $result['node'];

more or less. You'd have to pass in the 'field_machine_name' and 'node' parts to the API so that it knew what entity type and field name to use. Almost seems like more trouble than it's worth to make this an API function.

Postponed until somebody provides a good solution.

Just switch back to 7.x-1.x-dev branch because of new maintaining strategy.

I'm closing this issue too given that Drupal 7 is no longer supported, if anyone needs this included in a potential D7 release, please contact me.

Since D8+ it's so easy to realize just with the EntityTypeManager (etm). So it doesn't make sense to build an API inside this module.
Incomplete example, just to show a starting point:

$storage = \Drupal::entityTypeManager()->getStorage($entity_type);
$entities_array = $storage->loadByProperties(['field_name' => $machine_name_value) ?? [];