A local development environment is a complete copy of a site — web server, database, PHP — running on your own computer, where breaking things costs nothing and teaches plenty. DDEV is the tool we use for this on every project: it wraps Docker so you never have to learn Docker, and it speaks Drupal, WordPress, and plain PHP out of the box. You’ll need a computer with 8 GB of RAM or more and a copy of a site’s code (even a fresh empty project works for this lesson).

Install a Docker runtime

DDEV runs its servers inside Docker containers, so a Docker provider goes on first. On macOS, install OrbStack — it’s what DDEV’s own docs recommend, fast and low-fuss (Docker Desktop and Colima work too). On Windows, use WSL2 with Docker installed inside it. On Linux, install Docker Engine from your distribution. Open the provider once so it’s running before the next step.

Install DDEV

macOS or Linux with Homebrew:

brew install ddev/ddev/ddev

Or the official install script on Linux/WSL2:

curl -fsSL https://ddev.com/install.sh | bash

Then confirm it landed:

ddev --version

If it offers to run mkcert -install, say yes — that’s what makes your local sites load over https without browser warnings.

Configure your first project

From the folder that holds the site’s code:

cd ~/Sites/my-site
ddev config

DDEV inspects the folder, guesses the project type (Drupal, WordPress, generic PHP), and asks you to confirm. Accepting the defaults is almost always right. The result is a .ddev/ folder — configuration, not magic, and safe to commit once the site is under version control.

Start it and open the site

ddev start
ddev launch

First start pulls the container images, so give it a few minutes; every start after that takes seconds. ddev launch opens the site in your browser at an address like https://my-site.ddev.site. A fresh project will want an install or a database import — ddev import-db --file=backup.sql.gz handles the latter, and the copy-a-live-drupal-site-to-ddev lesson walks the full pull.

Learn the daily commands

Six cover almost every day you’ll spend in it:

ddev start          # bring the project up
ddev stop           # put it away
ddev describe       # URLs, database creds, status
ddev ssh            # a shell inside the web container
ddev composer install   # run composer inside the project
ddev poweroff       # stop everything DDEV is running

The habit that matters: run site tools through ddev — ddev composer, ddev drush, ddev wp — so they use the project’s PHP and database instead of whatever your laptop happens to have. (If Composer itself is new to you, here’s what it actually does.)

Verify with a throwaway experiment

The point of local is that mistakes are free, so verify by making one. Open a template or theme file in the project, type something obviously wrong into it, save, and reload the browser — you should see your mistake staring back, which proves this copy is really yours. Now undo the edit and reload again: clean. The live site never noticed, because there’s no wire between them. That’s the whole gift of a local environment — your own private lake, and every capsize is just a swim.