Blog: 2025 review

[rfay]

It's time to reflect on our successes and not-so-much in 2025. Wow, there's a lot to say.

My working list:

• Massively improved reporting/communication/management of sponsorship information, with public feed, banners on ddev sites and thedroptimes, and ddev start notifications daily

• Add-on registry

• PHP-based add-ons

• Upsun add-on

• Improved and extensible ddev share

• Monitoring of add-ons (ours and others)

• Global DDEV commands available inside the web container.

• [New generic web server type for Node.js](https://ddev.readthedocs.io/en/stable/users/extend/customization-extendibility/#using-nodejs-as-ddevs-primary-web-server).

• Integrated XHGui into DDEV

• Optional [Docker Compose profiles](https://docs.docker.com/compose/how-tos/profiles/): You can start projects with specific profiles using ddev start --profiles=list,of,profiles

• Added and expanded shell completion.

• Windows Installer handling Traditional Windows, WSL2/Docker CE, and Docker/Rancher Desktop.

• Parallel Docker image pulls for faster performance.

• [Automatic HTTP/S communication between DDEV projects](https://docs.ddev.com/en/stable/users/usage/managing-projects/#access-another-project-via-https)

• AI use, good and bad

  • Really significant features that were were too daunting to start without AI
  • Increased code burden, amount of code. Lots and lots of tests, but quality of tests varies.
  • Lots of claude code, some copilot
  • Course we used at coursera

• Add-on ecosystem, amazing maintenance by Stas and improved standards.

• Improvements of [ddev.com](http://ddev.com)

  • Downloads page
  • copy button

ddev-2025-accomplishments.md
ddev-2025-ecosystem-accomplishments.md

[stasadev]

Features:

• New ddev-hostname binary, no sudo inside ddev.

• x-ddev extension for add-ons. Elegant and customizable.

• --user / -u flag for ddev exec and ddev ssh. A recent change, and very useful.

• ddev describe works on a stopped project. I wanted this for a long time.

• ddev utility download-images --all forces pulling all images in use. This is a good way to get fresh updates for third-party images like redis, phpmyadmin, and others.

• ddev add-on get downloads all add-on dependencies.

• Refactoring our code for the Docker API. Not visible to users, but with a big impact on development: no calls to the docker binary (switched to github.com/docker/cli) and no fragile YAML map structures for docker-compose.yaml (switched to github.com/compose-spec/compose-go/v2).

Fixes:

• ddev config cannot be run in the parent directory of a DDEV project. This change saved me from making that mistake many times this year.

• ddev exec now respects arguments with spaces, so there is no need for ddev exec --raw. I don't use ddev exec much, I prefer ddev ssh and run commands directly, but this definitely caused friction before.

• Improved cleanup for ddev delete and ddev delete images.

Downsides:

• Using bitnami/mysql for 8.0 and 8.4 backfired with Changes in bitnami/mysql Docker Hub (effective August 28th, 2025) ddev#7470. I thought it was a good long-term decision. It makes me think about what we do when a dependency moves into a different direction.

[ultimike]

If this list is just about technical accomplishments, then the above looks pretty comprehensive.

If you want to consider all DDEV accomplishments, then I'd include the new Board of Directors, continuing advisory board meetings, and maybe a quote or two from https://www.ironstar.io/devsurvey25/#almost-everybody-loves-ddev

-mike

[tyler36]

• Community continues to extend DDEV and share addons

$ ddev addon list
...
176 repositories found. Add-ons marked with '*' are officially maintained DDEV add-ons.

[deviantintegral]

Did we experience any major breaks due to upstream changes in operating systems or docker? It seems like the macOS 26 cycle went smoothly. Can we attribute that to anything in ddev, or is it just good luck?

[rfay]

@deviantintegral macOS 26 went great (but so have most of them). Using the docker abstraction helps us enormously. There was a problem with a point version of macOS 15.7 during the transition, where Apple somehow made tmpdir unwriteable in some situations, ddev/ddev#7678

Definitely not "good luck" though. The amazingly expansive automated testing keeps DDEV ahead of user experience, so we can be proactive. We also try to upgrade things ahead of users, so I was on the macOS 26 betas fairly early.