DDEV

I've been working with Drupal for about 12 years now and I've tried a lot of tools for local development: Vagrant, Mamp, Xampp, Docker and installing everything directly on my Mac.

All of these solutions worked, but they also had problems. The setup I liked the most was installing PHP, MySQL directly on my mac and set up a local domain with dnsmasq. This setup worked great for me but one big issue was that over time you work with a lot of different clients that all have different web servers, versions of stuff and requirements. My local setup required me to change the PHP version on my mac everytime I needed to test something specific (and change back when I was done). Figuring out bugs happening on a specific web server or database version was even more problematic.

Enter DDEV

DDEV is docker based, and I was quite skeptical in the beginning because of my earlier attempts at docker based development. Slow websites, much config and work to get the docker files to work as I wanted.

With DDEV all of the Docker stuff is abstracted away and for regular projects you only touch a single file config.yaml.

It can look like this:

# .ddev/config.yaml
name: example
type: drupal9
docroot: web
php_version: "8.3"
webserver_type: nginx-fpm
router_http_port: "80"
router_https_port: "443"
xdebug_enabled: false
additional_hostnames: []
additional_fqdns: []
database:
    type: mariadb
    version: "10.4"
nfs_mount_enabled: false
mutagen_enabled: true
use_dns_when_possible: true
composer_version: "2"
web_environment: []
nodejs_version: "16"

With this file in your project all you need to do is type ddev start to have a website running at example.ddev.site. If you need to switch to apache or use a different PHP version, edit the config and type ddev restart.

Many possibilities

DDEV works without configuring anything more than the above. But it can do so much more. You can specifiy custom docker images, add multiple hostnames and enable addons. There are addons for elasticsearch, varnish, mongodb++.

Good framework support

DDEV has a generic PHP project template so it could work with all kinds of PHP based projects. But it also comes with support for many popular frameworks like Drupal, WordPress, Statamic and more.

Installing DDEV

DDEV has very good documentation for many environments.

On a mac you can install it with brew like this:

# Install DDEV
brew install ddev/ddev/ddev

# One-time initialization of mkcert
mkcert -install

Bottom line

DDEV has made it so easy to work with multiple PHP-versions, packages, web servers and setups without having to juggle versions and install everything locally.