nmenon

Thank you Joachim, I have it working now.

i ended up creating a plugin that contianed the generated code from this site that creates custom post types https://generatewp.com/post-type/

but i think the problem i was having before when it wasnt working was that i had the add_action function priority param set to a high number so it must have been creating the custom post type after your plugin loaded and therefor couldnt find that post type. Once it was changed back to 0 it now works as expected.