Introduction to DDEV and Craft CMS

I’ve used many local devel­op­ment tools over the years, from hand-rolled with sys­tem soft­ware, MAMP, and Valet. They all have their advan­tages but for going from con­fig­u­ra­tion to cod­ing, DDEV is one of the best avail­able. In this series, we will cov­er how to install, con­fig­ure, and use DDEV for Craft CMS development.

What is DDEV?

Before we jump in, let’s talk a lit­tle about DDEV, so there’s no con­fu­sion on how it works, and most impor­tant­ly, how it is dif­fer­ent from oth­er local devel­op­ment tools. 

You’re prob­a­bly watch­ing this because you’ve used a myr­i­ad of oth­er tools dur­ing your web devel­op­ment career. Was it MAMP? Valet? WAMP? Hand-rolled? 

Whichev­er it is, DDEV is a lit­tle dif­fer­ent because of the com­bi­na­tion of flex­i­bil­i­ty and the sol­id base

DDEV is a Dock­er-based local devel­op­ment envi­ron­ment tool. The biggest sell­ing point of DDEV is that it great­ly sim­pli­fies the instal­la­tion and man­age­ment of your projects using Docker. 

Maybe hear­ing the word ​“Dock­er” kicks off a bead of sweat on your brow, or the hairs on the back of your neck to stand up. It’s under­stand­able; on its own, Dock­er can be dif­fi­cult to set­up and get working. 

DDEV tries to sim­pli­fy using Dock­er, with built-in tool­ing that han­dles all of the hard parts. 

In short, I think it’s a supe­ri­or devel­op­er expe­ri­ence than you’d get else­where with Docker.

I use DDEV for some of my own projects (includ­ing almost all of my client projects), because I know I can reli­ably spin up the project at a moment’s notice.

Dock­er Desktop

Dock­er Desk­top (or a suit­able replace­ment per the DDEV offi­cial doc­u­men­ta­tion) is required before you can use DDEV. Since DDEV is a Dock­er-based local devel­op­ment tool, you need to have the Dock­er engine run­ning. Dock­er Desk­top for macOS (Intel or Apple Sil­i­con) or Win­dows makes this very simple. 

To down­load Dock­er Desk­top, vis­it the Dock­er Desk­top prod­uct page, and you should see down­load options for your cur­rent oper­at­ing system.

Once you have Dock­er Desk­top installed, launch it and give it a few min­utes to start up. After that, you are ready to move on to the next step!