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Raised: $8,665 Goal: $12,000
72% of monthly goal Help us cross the finish line!
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Introducing coder.ddev.com: DDEV in the Cloud

Randy Fay avatar
Randy Fay

March 11, 2026 6 min read

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start.coder.ddev.com — Coder Workspaces landing page showing the DDEV logo and Open in Coder button

What is coder.ddev.com?

coder.ddev.com is a free, experimental cloud DDEV service. You log in with GitHub, create a workspace, and get a full DDEV environment in the cloud — no local Docker, no local installation needed.

⚠️ Warning

Experimental Service

This is an experimental service with no guarantees of data retention, uptime, or long-term availability. The future of its maintenance and sustainability is uncertain. Do not store irreplaceable work here without pushing it to Git. Treat it as a convenience, not a platform to depend on.

Want a quick overview? Watch the 6-minute intro video starting from the very beginning:

Table of Contents

How It Works

coder.ddev.com runs on Coder, an open-source platform for remote development environments. Each workspace is an isolated container (using the Sysbox runtime for secure Docker-in-Docker) with DDEV, Docker, and VS Code pre-installed.

Your files persist on a remote volume across workspace restarts. When you delete a workspace, the data is gone — so push your work to Git before deleting. But until you delete the workspace, or it’s garbage-collected (not yet implemented), your work persists..

The source code for the templates and Docker image is at github.com/ddev/coder-ddev. Other projects can use this and deploy their own fully-DDEV-capable Coder instances.

Getting Started

1. Log In with GitHub

Go to coder.ddev.com and click Login with GitHub. No separate account needed. coder.ddev.com receives read-only access to your email addresses, public profile, and GitHub organization membership — no code access, no write access.

2. Create a Workspace

From the dashboard, click Create Workspace and choose a template:

  • drupal-core — automated Drupal core development environment
  • user-defined-web — general-purpose DDEV for any project
  • freeform — DDEV with Traefik routing integration for stable URLs

Give your workspace a name and click Create Workspace. Most workspaces start in under a minute. The drupal-core template (with seed cache) is ready in about 30 seconds.

3. Access Your Workspace

Once running, you have several options to use your workspace:

  • Web Browser: From coder.ddev.com, use the many options, including web-based terminal, VS Code for Web, and VS Code Desktop.
  • SSH with coder CLI: Install the Coder CLI, then coder login https://coder.ddev.com and coder ssh <workspace-name>.

Template Overview

drupal-core

The drupal-core template sets up a complete Drupal core contribution environment automatically using joachim-n/drupal-core-development-project. Drupal core is cloned, Composer dependencies are installed, and a demo site is installed — all in about 30 seconds when a seed cache is available.

Choose your Drupal version when creating the workspace:

  • main (12.x / HEAD) — latest development (default)
  • 11.x — current stable branch
  • 10.x — previous stable branch

The template automatically selects the correct PHP version and DDEV project type for the chosen branch.

Log in to the site with admin / admin.

This takes less than 4 minutes, try it out:

freeform

The freeform template adds Traefik routing integration so your DDEV project and services like Mailpit get stable subdomain URLs (no port numbers). After creating a workspace, run ddev coder-setup once in your project directory, then ddev start. Routing updates automatically on every start.

The Drupal Issue Picker

One of the most useful features for Drupal contributors is the Drupal Issue Picker at start.coder.ddev.com/drupal-issue.

Drupal Core Issue Picker — enter an issue URL or number to launch a pre-configured workspace
Drupal Core Issue Picker — enter an issue URL or number to launch a pre-configured workspace

Paste any drupal.org issue URL (for example, https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/3568144) and the picker launches a drupal-core workspace with:

  • The correct Drupal version (10.x, 11.x, or main) detected from the issue
  • The issue fork branch already checked out
  • Composer dependencies resolved

This replaces the workflow that DrupalPod (Gitpod-based) provided for contribution days. You can hand someone an issue URL, they paste it into the picker, and within 30 seconds they have a working environment with the issue branch ready.

Demonstrating this from start to finish in about 6 minutes:

Development Tools

VS Code Web

“VS Code Web” runs in the browser and supports most extensions. You can install extensions from the marketplace, configure settings, and use the integrated terminal — all without installing anything locally.

VS Code Desktop

Clicking on “VS Code Desktop” opens up your local installation of VS Code and then automatically uses the Remote-SSH extension to connect to your Coder workspace. It’s nice, I used it a lot in preparing this blog and even in some recent work on Coder.ddev.com itself. All VS Code features work.

Xdebug

Xdebug works in Coder workspaces the same way as local DDEV with the DDEV VS Code Extension.

Coder CLI

The Coder CLI provides SSH access, port forwarding, file transfer, and workspace management. It’s a completely different way of interacting with your workspace. Install with brew install coder or other options.

# Login
coder login https://coder.ddev.com

# List workspaces
coder list

# SSH into workspace
coder ssh my-workspace

# Forward a port locally
coder port-forward my-workspace --tcp 8080:80

# Stop workspace (preserves data)
coder stop my-workspace

Accessing Your Project

Because DDEV runs inside a cloud container, the usual *.ddev.site URLs don’t work. Instead, access your project via the DDEV Web app link in the Coder dashboard, or use port forwarding, and ddev start, ddev launch and ddev describe also give URL information.

The freeform template handles this automatically with Traefik routing — you get stable subdomain URLs like https://<workspace>--<workspace>--<owner>.coder.ddev.com/.

Stopping and Deleting Workspaces

Stop: Stops the container and frees compute resources. All files in /home/coder are preserved. Use this when you are done for the day.

Delete: Permanently removes the workspace and all data. Always push your code to Git before deleting.

This can also be done from the command-line on your local machine (after coder login https://coder.ddev.com):

coder list
coder stop my-workspace   # Stop (data preserved)
coder delete my-workspace # Delete (data lost permanently)

FAQ

  • How do I pull/push to GitHub/GitLab/Drupalcode? (or use SSH)?

Use the coder publickey command to get the publickey associated with your coder.ddev.com projects (it’s the same for all projects). You can then add that to GitHub/GitLab/Drupalcode/Remote SSH to allow you to access those resources.

  • How do I set this up myself for my own initiative?

The full details are in the repository at github.com/ddev/coder-ddev.

  • Where is this running?

This is running on a 64GB Hetzner bare-metal Ubuntu 24.04 machine in Helsinki, Finland. It has lots of disk and costs about $50/month.

Thanks to Coder.com

The world of open source is amazing. Coder.com is a shockingly mature project, and so many of these things worked just great out of the box.

What’s Next

The templates and image are open source at github.com/ddev/coder-ddev. Contributions, bug reports, and feature requests are welcome.

Getting Help

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