Setting up a Windows Machine for DDEV

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Randy Fay

November 4, 2024 4 min read

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Windows, DDEV, Ubuntu logos demonstrating 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.)

  1. Remove unwanted applications like Solitaire and MS Office. I usually start by removing a bunch of bloatware.
  2. Do all Windows updates.
  3. Turn off the System -> Notifications -> Additional settings that cause the “Windows experience” prompts after upgrade.
  4. 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.)
  5. 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.
  6. In PowerShell, wsl --install and wsl --update
  7. 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.
  8. 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>
  9. In Windows Explorer, add my WSL2 home directory to favorites by copying it into the favorites area.
  10. 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.)
  11. Install and test the fantastic 1Password ssh agent.
  12. On Windows PowerShell ssh -T [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.
  13. 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 use ssh.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)
  14. If you have a dotfiles repository (containing your shared .bash_profile, .zshrc, etc.) clone it in WSL2.
  15. Check out DDEV’s code. mkdir -p ~/workspace && cd ~/workspace && git clone -o upstream [email protected]:ddev/ddev
  16. echo "capath=/etc/ssl/certs/" >>~/.curlrc to make Curl work right with mkcert.
  17. 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.
  18. DDEV repository setup
    • Run .githooks/linkallchecks.sh
    • Install golangci-lint for make staticrequired: go install github.com/golangci/golangci-lint/cmd/golangci-lint@latest

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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