Randy loves dueling with computers and his career has spanned Apple ][ home automation, Unix/Linux kernel driver development, Windows, Drupal, and loads of fun system administration and DevOps work. After years of Drupal work he's delighted to be working on DDEV-Local, which provides an easy way to do web development locally.
In 2022, users from designers to developers to testers and open source contributors have a wide variety of local development environments to chose from. Because most of the tools and platforms we use will run in many different operating systems and environments, we have the option of rolling our own, using a commercial project like … Continued
TL;DR: On Windows, if you use WSL2 for anything, make sure you enable “Windows Update” → “Advanced Options” -> Receive updates for other Microsoft Products” so that your WSL2 kernel gets updated, whether you’re using traditional Windows or WSL2 for development. One of the great things about DDEV is that it has huge test coverage. … Continued
Although many of you know this, I wanted to make a formal announcement of some great news. Platform.sh has stepped up to become a lead sponsor of the DDEV open-source project! Platform is committed to the long-term viability of the project and to encourage development of a diverse group of contributors and co-maintainers. Platform is … Continued
I’m sure you already know that Docker Desktop changed its license terms so that larger organizations are required to pay a per-seat license fee to use it now. We all hope that Docker does well and certainly there’s nothing wrong with an organization charging for its work, but there are many organizations that are uncomfortable … Continued
There’s been lots of excitement about the new docker-based performance options on macOS with DDEV lately. In DDEV v1.19 Colima is a new option, and Colima with Mutagen enabled is screaming fast. But Docker Desktop has just released an experimental VirtioFS filesystem mounting system that is much faster than previous iterations. So I was interested … Continued
Ddev v1.18.0-alpha1 introduces a new performance improvement based on Mutagen.io. It eliminates the required wait time when a bind-mounted file is accessed inside (or outside) the container. The improvements for general web activity are quite striking, as shown in the graphs below. On macOS, a Drupal 9 web installation can be twice as fast as … Continued
If you know something about Docker, you know that you can throw one or two Docker images together and get yourself a working local development environment. There are plenty of nginx and php images out there on hub.docker.com, and you can do lots and lots of things with them. So why use DDEV-Local, a tool … Continued
DDEV-Local‘s v1.16 release has support for “Casual webhosting including Let’s Encrypt.” DDEV users have often requested the ability to use ddev as a self-managed low-end webserver, for things like small sites or sharing pre-release code, etc, and now it has arrived. Why “Casual Webhosting”? Ever since the beginning of DDEV-Local, folks have found its simplicity … Continued
Any web developer will have to move a site from one place to another periodically, so mastering the concepts and the details are important. The details are a little different from CMS to CMS, but the big picture stays mostly the same. Please note that many people have many opinions about all of this, and … Continued
DDEV-Local v1.16 now supports the ARM64 architecture on Linux and Windows WSL2. You can read all about ARM64 and what it means to the world (and to DDEV) in the previous blog on ARM64, Apple Silicon, and Apple’s M1 chip. Since I don’t have a big machine to test with, I got the ARM64-based Raspberry … Continued
