Setting up a Windows Machine for DDEV
I’ve recently set up a few Windows machines for DDEV maintenance and development, and wanted to share how I do it. It’s surprisingly easy. My approach here is opinionated, but it works for me. You’ll do things a little differently I’m sure.
Two recent Windows machines I set up were the new ARM64/Qualcomm/CoPilot variety. They were excellent and fast and had great battery life. There’s very little I had to do differently with them, but I’ll mention in the steps when there was something different. (I was surprised by the lack of a fingerprint sensor on both, but the “Windows Hello” facial recognition was quite fast. There is no ARM64 Discord app, and the AMD64 one had horrific performance.)
- Remove unwanted applications like Solitaire and MS Office. I usually start by removing a bunch of bloatware.
- Do all Windows updates.
- Turn off the
System
->Notifications
->Additional settings
that cause the “Windows experience” prompts after upgrade. - Enable Windows Update->Advanced Options->Receive updates for other Microsoft Products. Amazingly, this is not on by default, and you might have an old WSL2 kernel! (See Beware of Dirty Pipes.)
- Install important apps. I always start with these. Each of these except Discord had an ARM64 version. If on an ARM64 machine, make sure you get the right version!
- Notion
- Chrome
- 1Password
- PhpStorm (Although there are many ways to use PhpStorm on WSL2, I just open the project in
\\wsl.localhost\Ubuntu\home\rfay\workspace\<project>
and it works great and performance is fine.) - GoLand
- Discord
- Slack
- Perforce P4V is my favorite merge conflict resolver.
- In PowerShell,
wsl --install
andwsl --update
- Windows Terminal is a fantastic terminal and is installed by default these days. I always set it up early with “Default Terminal Application: Windows Terminal” and “Interaction->Automatically Copy Selection to Clipboard”, and set Ubuntu as default, and have it auto-start on login.
- Once Ubuntu is installed:
sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y apt-transport-https autojump build-essential ca-certificates ccache clang curl dirmngr etckeeper expect git gnupg jq libcurl4-gnutls-dev libnss3-tools lsb-release mariadb-client nagios-plugins net-tools postgresql-client unzip vim xdg-utils zip && sudo apt upgrade -y
sudo snap install --classic go
sudo snap install ngrok and ngrok config add-authtoken <token>
- In Windows Explorer, add my WSL2 home directory to favorites by copying it into the favorites area.
- Run the DDEV WSL2 install script.
- On ARM64 this will fail the Chocolatey installation because Chocolatey doesn’t plan to support ARM64. But you can ignore the failure; the script continues on anyway.
- On ARM64,
choco uninstall -y mkcert gsudo
so that the DDEV installer can get the native versions of each of these. - On ARM64, install the Windows-side DDEV from the installer in the DDEV releases. We’ll probably discontinue documenting the Chocolatey install technique in the future.)
- Install and test the fantastic 1Password ssh agent.
- On Windows PowerShell
ssh [email protected] [email protected]
to verify that the 1Password SSH agent is working. If it says “PTY Allocation Failed”, just hit<RETURN>
and ignore it. You should get the confirmation message from GitHub. - 1Password WSL2 adaptation:
sudo ln -s /mnt/c/WINDOWS/System32/OpenSSH/ssh.exe /usr/local/bin/ssh && sudo ln -s /mnt/c/WINDOWS/System32/OpenSSH/ssh-add.exe /usr/local/bin/ssh-add
(Makes ssh usessh.exe
on Windows and the 1Password SSH and Git integrations then work great. This assumes that/usr/local/bin
in your PATH comes before/usr/bin
) - If you have a
dotfiles
repository (containing your shared.bash_profile
,.zshrc
, etc.) clone it in WSL2. - Check out DDEV’s code.
mkdir -p ~/workspace && cd ~/workspace && git clone -o upstream [email protected]:ddev/ddev
echo "capath=/etc/ssl/certs/" >>~/.curlrc
to make Curl work right withmkcert
.- GoLand setup:
- Set
GOROOT
to/snap/go
- For ARM64 you have to do
go install github.com/go-delve/delve/cmd/dlv@latest
and put this in IDE properties (under help)dlv.path=//wsl.localhost/Ubuntu/home/rfay/go/bin/dlv
.
- Set
- DDEV repository setup
- Run
.githooks/linkallchecks.sh
- Install
golangci-lint
formake staticrequired
:go install github.com/golangci/golangci-lint/cmd/golangci-lint@latest
- Run
We’d love to hear your own hints and tips on how you set up a Windows machine (or any other computer!). You can contribute to this article with a PR to the blog or make your suggestions on Discord. We welcome guest blogs too!
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