Craft CMS & DDEV: A Quick Start Guide (2022)

With Nitro being retired by Pixel & Tonic, we needed to migrate to DDEV and wanted to share our process.

The following tutorial walks you through the process required to get DDEV installed on your machine. Once we cover that, it also informs you on how to get a new or existing Craft CMS project up and running.

The tutorial was built off the Fortrabbit guide & the Craft CMS official quick start guide which can be found in the link below. Please consult them for any questions that you might have on creating a new project or how DDEV functions compared

We will use Homebrew to install DDEV. Make sure that the Homebrew package manager is installed on your system, using the link below.

DDEV works with Docker, which must be both installed and open for the DDEV installation to work.

After making sure that the Docker app is open and has been configured, install DDEV using the following line in terminal.

This will install DDEV and the libraries needed to install it.

Congratulations, you have successfully installed DDEV. The next steps are centered around making DDEV work with an existing Craft CMS project.

If by chance you're looking to start a new project, run the following command line in Terminal in the directory that you wish to create a folder with a new Craft CMS project:

If you are new to Craft CMS, follow their installation guide provided in the link below.

In terminal set the current directory to that of the Craft CMS project that you wish to run with DDEV.

Run the following command in terminal:

Please note that the default docroot is web and the project type is php for Craft CMS. This implies that you can press enter to each question that is asked, as it is the default answer.

Under the newly created .ddev folder, modify your config.yaml to your needs. Crafts CMS's suggestions are the following:

• Set php_version to whichever you need. (More in config.yaml’s comments.)
• The database type can be mariadb, mysql, or postgres with a corresponding version.
• Use additional_hostnames for other *.ddev.site domain names you’d like to use, or additional_fqdns for other custom domain names.

In our case, we updated the settings to take a mysql database to match version 8.0 (highest version allowed by DDEV) and subsequently running the following commands in Terminal:

Followed by

Run the following command in terminal:

ddev start

Run the following command in terminal:

Update your Craft CMS .env to match the details of the ddev describe.

To avoid your project checking in a lot of unnecessary changes, add the .ddev folder to your gitignore.

Replace YOUR_DB_PATH, with the path of a dump of your existing database and run the following command in terminal:

Copy the Craft CMS website URL found in the ddev describe and paste it into your browser.

We are actively looking for feedback on how to improve this resource. Please send us a note to inquiries@delasign.com with any thoughts or feedback you may have.