Happy February!

DDEV v1.24.2 was released with MySQL 8.4 support and improved ddev composer create making it nearly compatible with composer create-project.

DDEV Notes and News

• The DDEV Advisory Group met January 8. The primary topic of discussion was the change in DDEV’s funding and budgeting response to it. Our decision was to continue the arrangement with Stas as-is (bill hours at $50/hour, cap $4000/month). Randy will also bill at $50/hour with cap of $4000, but limited by always trying to leave $6000 in the bank.
• We need your input! Please take a look at the proposed 2025 Plans for DDEV and let us know your opinion, how these things should be ordered, and what we might have missed!
• macOS users will be interested in the (not-DDEV-focused) Docker Performance macOS 2025.
• The Open Source Pledge and DDEV: A Path to Sustainability.
• MySQL 8.4 is now in DDEV v1.24.2.
• DDEV v1.24.2 has improved argument handling for ddev composer create, making it nearly compatible with composer create-project. Additionally, the ddev composer create-project alias has been added for improved usability.
• The Gitpod that we have known and loved is shutting down. This affects DDEV contributors that have used it and makes DrupalPod as it stands obsolete. If you’re interested in DrupalPod and will be at DrupalCon Atlanta, there is a Birds-of-a-Feather session scheduled on the path forward, 04:00pm – 04:30pm Tuesday, March 25, 2025.
• The Drop Times did a nice and extensive interview with Randy and video interview.
• Tag1 Consulting did a performance comparison of the new Drupal CMS vs WordPress, (using DDEV for everything). See Drupal CMS vs WordPress Performance.
• The latest DDEV Quickstarts in the docs are for Drupal CMS and ProcessWire! Congratulations to the Drupal community on Drupal CMS, and welcome ProcessWire folks. Thanks to Bernhard Baumrock for the ProcessWire initiative!
• DDEV: We use it on all our projects. (Followups in Reddit r/php and Reddit r/drupal).

Ongoing DDEV Work

• Node.js improved support: People have asked for some time for Node.js to be the primary web server (instead of Nginx+php-fpm, etc), and now it can be done in a number of ways. This is now in DDEV HEAD and there are Quickstarts for Simple Node.js and SvelteKit. Incidentally, this also provides experimental support for FrankenPHP and provides a Quickstart for it as a demonstration of the “generic” web server type.
• Web-based Add-on Registry: As add-ons have become so very popular it’s hard to sort them out and understand which ones are meaningful for a particular need. This long-term goal is nearing completion as Stas has a proof of concept and now has to push it through to a maintained production status.
• Automated Tests for Quickstarts: You won’t see these, but it’s a big step for us. Because our Quickstarts are so dependent on the behavior of the upstream projects, it’s always been hard for us to know when the target project has had a change that invalidates them. Now we have automated tests for the quickstarts of number of project types, and will add others as maintenance is done. Thanks to Ralf Koller for extensive work on the Drupal, WordPress, and TYPO3 quickstarts.
• Funding situation data feed: Aiming for ever-increasing transparency in the DDEV funding situation, we now have an automatically-updated feed showing our funding situation from all sources. You can see the exact situation at any time. We expect to use this feed in the message-of-the-day on DDEV, as well as ddev.com and the DDEV README.
• New contributors and maintainers: As DDEV’s community grows, we always need new contributors and maintainers. We love to get contributors trained and get privileges to maintainers as needed! We already have lots of Contributor Training material, and docs on how to contribute but we’ll do anything you ask for! Need help with something? Need updates? Join us in Discord or make an appointment with me.

Funding DDEV and especially to help both maintainers go full-time on DDEV: 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’ve slipped back 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 $3000/month, have been spending about $3000-$4000/month. Bank balance is about $6,000, down from $8,600 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 on

• blog
• LinkedIn
• Mastodon
• Bluesky
• and join our community on Discord

Happy February from Randy Fay, DDEV Project Lead. It’s a delight to collaborate with you!