DDEV November 2024 Newsletter

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Randy Fay

November 1, 2024 4 min read

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Palisade, Colorado, USA, November 1, 2024

Happy November from DDEV! It’s a beautiful fall here, but things are cooling down. We live in an agricultural area, so the first freeze is always an event.

It’s Maintainer Stas Zhuk’s first anniversary as a full DDEV maintainer!. I asked him to share what he’s most proud of this year. I know how amazingly grateful I am to work alongside him and to such an amazingly capable co-maintainer who has full privileges on all things DDEV.

It’s been a great year working as an official DDEV maintainer.

One thing I’m proud of is improving the ddev composer create command to work just like composer create-project. Even though I’ve done a lot with Composer as PHP developer, I still learned new things while working on this.

I’m also proud of adding support for .ddev/.env.* files in add-ons. It seemed simple at first, but it was connected to so many other parts of the code. It took a few months and many changes to get it right.

Another feature I worked on is ddev config --nodejs-version auto. This helped me better understand how ddev start really works. There’s so much going on behind the scenes, more than just a docker-compose up.

When I started using DDEV, I already knew a bit about Docker, but I’ve learned a lot more by working on DDEV’s Docker networks. I’ve made a lot of PRs to improve this.

I also had my first experience with Docker multi-stage builds in DDEV. We use it to compile Xdebug for some PHP versions, and it was fun to learn.

The ddev launch :port feature has been really useful. It’s hard to imagine that DDEV didn’t have it before.

I recently added automatic timezone detection in the web container. It seems like a small thing, but it has a big impact on simplicity and is very convenient for developers.

Finally, the upcoming ddev cd feature is something I’m excited about. I used to have a custom Bash script for this, but now it will be built into DDEV, with autocomplete.

Advisory Group Meeting Wednesday: All are invited to the DDEV Advisory Group meeting Wednesday, November 6, 9am US MT, 5PM CET. Meetup link or Zoom link, passcode “12345” if you need it.

Contributor Trainings From October (Recordings and Blogs):

DDEV Notes from around the web:

Upcoming Major Release v1.24.0 will change the defaults for new projects. PHP will be 8.3, Node.js will be v22. There will be a few new features, but I don’t think any other major changes in behavior.

Fully funding Maintainer Stas: We need your help and your organization’s help! Let me know if you need help getting this into your 2025 budget! Our key financial goal is to fully fund @stasadev so he can work exclusively on DDEV. We’re about 30% of the way to that goal, but apparently due to market conditions, have been going backward in recent months. We need about $3700/month in increased pledges from organizations and individuals. See Full information about supporting DDEV. We’re happy to invoice you, happy to do a call discussing this, and would love it if you’d include DDEV in your 2025 budgeting process. (Our current status: We receive about $4000-$5000/month, spend about $6000/month. Bank balance is about $9,000, down from $13,000 last month.)

THANKS to all of you who are supporting DDEV’s path to sustainability and who have gotten your organizations to do so.

Want to keep up as the month goes along? Follow our blog, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X, and join us on Discord.

Happy November from Randy Fay, DDEV Project Lead.

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