DDEV 2025 Plans and 2024 Review

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Randy Fay

February 8, 2025 9 min read

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2025 Plans and Notes

Every year we try to clarify goals early, and here we go for 2025! We’d love to have your thoughts and opinions! Some of the things we planned in 2024 aren’t quite done yet, but we’re working and planning and responding to your needs.

At the DDEV Advisory Group’s 2-hour annual review/planning meeting on March 5, 2025, we’ll talk about plans and priorities for 2025. You are invited! The meeting link is in the meeting page.

We’d love to have your input as regular users as we work through these priorities.

Community

  • Continue outstanding user support even with growth of our user base. This remains a key priority from last year, but we still need to involve the entire community (meaning you!) in all the places.
  • Begin formal governance for the DDEV Foundation. We’ve been talking about this in the Advisory Group for years, but this year I’ll propose a 3-person board for the DDEV Foundation, where I retain operational control, but we have at least one other board member fully enabled on financial controls and payments. Future years can bring future refinements.

Sustainability and Finance

  • Improve our Marketing CTA and information: The ddev.com “Support DDEV” page says lots of things, but the financial CTA gets lost there. We need to communicate successfully:
    • For the project to be sustainable, the community will need to support the two developers who are working full-time on it.
    • Show the many ways that support can be done can be done.
    • Communicate clearly our current situation. (The Drop Times rolled out an amazing promotion for DDEV, showing the current funding status against our goals. Now we need a community member to do the same thing for us in our website! See the March 2025 Newsletter).
  • Continue to develop contributors and maintainers: As the project grows, we need more skilled contributors and maintainers. (The only difference between those is that maintainers typically have a higher level of direct access to project resources, but as a wide-open source project, almost all interested contributors can accomplish almost anything without enhanced privileges.) In the last two years, we’ve had quite a lot of contributor trainings, and anecdotes indicate that people are using those recordings and blogs for training, but the actual attendance at them was not impressive. I’m thinking that this year these topics should probably be addressed with screenshare recordings and updated blogs instead of calendar-scheduled events. Given the financial struggles in our contributors’ world, I doubt that we’ll be able to add paid maintainers in 2025, I’m most interested right now in the reasonable goal of retaining and paying the two amazing maintainers we currently have.

Features and Initiatives

Funded and Work-In-Progress Initiatives

Proposed Features and Initiatives

  1. Implement mDNS as an alternate name resolution technique in addition to DNS and hosts file manipulation. Our traditional use of DNS and hosts-file manipulation have been successful, but mDNS might allow avoiding hosts-file manipulation, especially with non-ddev.site URLs and when internet DNS is not available. This has been submitted for funding to the TYPO3 Community Q2 Community Budget Ideas
  2. Allow Add-ons to include other add-ons: Add-ons can already require other add-ons, but they should be able to automatically result in a download.
  3. Go-based Upsun Add-on like ddev-platformsh. (This would pioneer golang-based add-ons; Go is probably a much better language for complicated add-ons of this type.)
  4. Rewrite ddev-platformsh Add-on in Go: Assuming success of the Upsun add-on, it would be great to backport that work to ddev-platformsh. It’s even possible that the two add-ons could be combined into one and maintained in one place.
  5. Develop a replacement for “Gitpod Classic”, which has EOL in April, 2025. This may not need much more than improved GitHub Codespaces support, but we have loved Gitpod and hope to have something to replace it.
  6. Improve self-diagnose capability . We currently have ddev debug test but it would be great to implement something that was readable and actionable for ordinary mortals.
  7. DDEV’s Message-of-the-day and ddev.com should show current funding status and need. We now have an automatically updated JSON feed that can make this possible.
  8. DDEV Windows/WSL2 packaging and installation: The traditional Windows installer needs work, and the WSL2 install scripts are written in hard-to-maintain PowerShell. This work can be consolidated and improved, including improving the Windows hosts-file escalation technique.
  9. Change ddev share to a more configurable custom-command-based option. Instead of always using ngrok there should be multiple ways to share.
  10. Rework configuration system using Viper.

(We applied to the Google Summer of Code, hoping to mentor contributors via that program. We did not get accepted, but will try in future years.)

Do you see other important things in the issue queue or elsewhere that are important to you? Are there frictions that impact your work that DDEV could fix? Please let us know.

We would dearly love to have your input on these as the planning process goes forward. You can respond so very many ways in all the support venues.

2025 Planning Additional Notes

Recognized Risks

We are a very small organization, so we try to pay careful attention to the risks as we go forward.

  • Key maintainer Stas lives in a very volatile situation in Ukraine, and none of us knows how to predict the future. Physical risks, communication risks, and financial transfer risks are always possible.
  • Randy is not young and can always face new risks.
  • The financial outlook for discretionary funding from agencies and hosting companies (and perhaps individuals) is horrible right now.
  • Any of our maintainers can become overworked or discouraged or can burn out. We take the risk of burnout and overwork very seriously and are careful to talk about them and try to prevent them.

Minor Notes

  • I (Randy) do expect to work less in 2025, but that hasn’t worked out so far. However, I am planning a bicycle trip that will make me mostly out of touch from late May through much of June. Stas has the keys to the kingdom and all the capabilities needed to make sure everything runs smoothly in my absence.
  • Updated blogs about key DDEV ideas are needed. For example, an updated blog about how DDEV is different from roll-your-own or bare metal, especially multiple database and PHP versions, and team share.
  • We need to review how key features are exposed in the documentation and in https://ddev.com. There are a number of cases the docs and website reflect DDEV as it was a few years ago. For example, add-ons, which are a fundamental feature, are not exposed clearly.
  • More screenshare blogs for ordinary DDEV users are important. We have many out there, but some are seriously aged.

2024 DDEV Review

This section is updated for our annual review of the past year at the DDEV Advisory Group.

Great Things

  • Stas Zhuk as a maintainer has been a massive success in so many ways. Not only is he completely technically fluent with DDEV in every area, but he loves supporting DDEV users, and we’ve been progressively successful in making sure he has adequate control of most areas of external accounts, etc.
  • Despite our challenges, our finances are currently in balance, and our expenditures are within our means. This is a result of many wonderful sponsors, both individuals and organizations. Thank you!
  • Outstanding contributors like tyler36, GuySartorelli, Hanoii, Bernardo Martinez, and Ralf Koller and many others continued to improve the project.
  • We continue to offer world-class support to DDEV users in many venues. In most cases, our community’s response is better than any commercial organization can offer. I think this has to do with the quality of the software (most people don’t need support) and also with our community’s overall commitment to generous and friendly support.
  • We worked hard at Live Contributor Training, and recorded blogs and training sessions, which is great. It’s not clear how successful these were in enabling new contributors, but occasional reports say that the recorded sessions have been helpful.
  • Prompted largely by The Drop Times we created the automatically-updated sponsorship-data repository, which has lots of potential for communicating about DDEV’s funding status.
  • The addons.ddev.com web-based add-on registry is now live.

Less Great Things

  • We didn’t really make progress with marketing or promotion in 2024. In fact, hosting companies and agencies with a clear stake in DDEV’s success did not step up and even started ghosting discussions about this. This is likely a result of market conditions, but it’s uncomfortable for us.
  • We tried to improve our marketing situation by engaging Open Strategy Partners, but didn’t achieve all we had hoped, and had to end the arrangement earlier than planned because our funding was inadequate to continue it.
  • Randy is definitely tired of reaching out to organizations and finding that they either don’t respond, or promise a response and don’t follow through, or just don’t have discretionary funds available and are unable to support DDEV at this point.
  • Platform.sh changed their funding. While their ongoing commitment remains generous, this was certainly a challenge.
  • We never did see a return of amazing contributor Simon Gilli and still mourn his loss. Nobody knows what happened to him. Of course this is a reminder that none of us and none of our contributions are guaranteed into the future and is another reason to shore up the organization to continue into the future with or without specific individuals.

Financial Status

Our full year financial reports, including balance sheet and profit-and-loss, were posted in the 2025-01-08 Advisory Group Meeting. You’ll see we ended the year with about $8,500 in the bank.

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