How to Install DDEV on Windows (WSL2)

The offi­cial DDEV doc­u­men­ta­tion rec­om­mends fol­low­ing their instruc­tions close­ly for installing DDEV on Win­dows with WSL2. 

A quick dis­claimer: I’m not a full-time Win­dows user, and I don’t devel­op web projects with Win­dows as my oper­at­ing sys­tem, so my knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence are lim­it­ed. If you have spe­cif­ic exper­tise in this area, please leave a com­ment below this video and share with oth­ers what you’ve learned about installing and run­ning DDEV and Dock­er on Win­dows with WSL2. 

Here are the pre­req­ui­sites before you can install and use DDEV on Win­dows WSL2:

1. DDEV rec­om­mends using Choco­late­ly for installing the required soft­ware. It’s option­al but should be an eas­i­er way to get mkcert installed. 
2. You also want to already have the Dock­er Desk­top for Win­dows appli­ca­tion already installed. You can down­load that appli­ca­tion by just googling for ​“Dock­er Desk­top for Win­dows” and the first result should be the down­load page. After that’s straight­for­ward to install. Once installed, make sure you start it and have the Dock­er engine run­ning. And then under settings->Resources, con­firm that you’re using the WSL2 backend.
3. Next up, install or con­firm that you have Home­brew. The DDEV docs have the com­mands you need to install Home­brew on your machine. You do this from the Ubun­tu ter­mi­nal, which should be avail­able in the Win­dows start menu. After that, add Home­brew to your path. 
4. Now you’re final­ly ready to install DDEV via Homebrew:

	brew install gcc && brew install drud/ddev/ddev

GCC will allow you to run the GNU com­pil­er for the instal­la­tion process. You can run these com­mands sep­a­rate­ly or togeth­er. You want to make sure you have have Home­brew in your path, oth­er­wise you’ll have to spec­i­fy the full path to the brew executable.

1. Final­ly, we need to install the xdg-utils which allows DDEV to inte­grate with the Win­dows desk­top environment.

	sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y xdg-utils 

Okay, now we’re ready to cre­ate our first project!