DDEV 2025 Year in Review

2025 has been a year of significant growth and accomplishment for DDEV. With 579 commits to the main repository and releases from v1.24.0 through v1.24.10, we’ve made substantial progress on features, infrastructure, and community building. Here’s a look back at what we all achieved together.

Organizational Milestones

Board of Directors Established: In December 2025, we formally established a Board of Directors for the DDEV Foundation, enhancing governance and setting the stage for long-term sustainability. We’re super proud of this as it’s something we’ve been working toward for years. Read all about it.
Advisory Group Continues: Our Advisory Group meetings continued throughout the year, providing valuable input and community input and oversight. It will continue just about the same even though we now have a formal Board.
“Almost Everybody Loves DDEV”: The Ironstar Developer Survey 2025 confirmed what we suspected - DDEV has strong community support and satisfaction.

Major Features and Improvements

Sponsorship Communication

Massively improved reporting, communication, and management of sponsorship information
Public sponsorship data feed via sponsorship-data repository
Banners on DDEV web properties and The Drop Times show current funding status
Daily ddev start notifications keep users informated about sponsorship status

Add-on Ecosystem

The Add-on Registry launched in January 2025, now displaying 175 add-ons, 28 of which are officially maintained by the DDEV team
PHP-based add-ons Add-ons can now be written in PHP, as the ddev-upsun add-on shows. The PHP language is far more capable for accomplishing complex tasks than shell scripts.
ddev add-on get now downloads add-on dependencies automatically
x-ddev extension allows add-ons to add important information to ddev describe output
Add-on monitoring continues for both official and community add-ons
New official add-ons: FrankenPHP (June), Redis Insight (July), Upsun (August), NVM Standalone (November)
By year’s end: 28+ official add-ons and 175+ total

Container and Infrastructure

Parallel Docker image pulls for faster project starts
Docker Compose profiles: Start projects with specific profiles using ddev start --profiles=list,of,profiles
Refactored Docker API code: no calls to docker binary (switched to github.com/docker/cli) and no fragile YAML map structures (switched to github.com/compose-spec/compose-go/v2)

Upcoming v1.25.0:

Podman support: Podman rootless/rootful environments
Docker rootless functionality added for Linux environments
Base web server image updated to Debian 13 Trixie

Developer Experience

New handling of privilege elevation using the ddev-hostname binary, improving security, read more
--user/-u flag for ddev exec and ddev ssh
ddev describe now works on stopped projects
ddev utility download-images --all forces pulling all images in use
Shell completion added and expanded thanks to community contributions
ddev npx command support
Improved cleanup for ddev delete and ddev delete images

Upcoming v1.25.0:

Improved ddev share: More configurable, customizable, with pre-share hooks and DDEV_SHARE_URL environment variable

Language and Database Updates

PHP 8.5 support added with a limited set of extensions
MariaDB 11.8 support added
PostgreSQL 18 support added
Node.js as primary web server support

Upcoming v1.25.0:

PHP 8.4 as default for new projects (previously PHP 8.3)
PHP 8.5 support with all extensions
Node.js 24 as default for new projects (previously Node.js 22)
MariaDB 11.8 as default for new projects (previously MariaDB 10.11)

Platform Integration

XHGui integration funded by TYPO3 Association, read more
ddev-upsun add-on provides new integration with Upsun (formerly Platform.sh) fixed and flex projects.
Automatic HTTP/S communication between DDEV projects
Enhanced and simpler Pantheon support

Windows Improvements

New Windows GUI Installer handling Traditional Windows, WSL2/Docker CE, and Docker/Rancher Desktop
ARM64 Windows installer support

Website and Documentation

Downloads page with improved installer access
Copy button for code blocks thanks to @bmartinez287
Giscus commenting system for community discussions on blog posts
AI integration documentation
Multiple blog posts published covering technical guides, platform-specific instructions, and organizational updates
Monthly newsletters tracking progress sign up!

IDE Integration

IntelliJ IDEA plugin got regular, consistent maintenance thanks to @AkibaAT and moved to the DDEV organization on GitHub
The VS Code DDEV Manager extension continued to be well maintained thanks to @biati-digital

AI in DDEV Development

2025 saw significant AI integration in our development workflow:

Substantial features enabled by AI: Several features that seemed too daunting to start became achievable with AI assistance
Increased code volume: More code, including extensive tests (though test quality varies)
Tools used: Claude Code, GitHub Copilot
Training: Coursera AI for Developers course

Removals in v1.25.0

NFS support removed
ddev service command removed
ddev nvm functionality removed
Legacy configuration syntax cleanup

Challenges

bitnami/mysql issue: Using bitnami/mysql for MySQL 8.0 and 8.4 backfired with Bitnami ceasing its traditional support of important Docker images. This raises questions about dependency management when upstream projects change direction.
We continue to struggle with funding for DDEV and went backward this year instead of forward.
Market conditions are affecting agency and hosting company funding

By the Numbers

579 commits to the main repository
100+ pull requests merged
Releases v1.24.0 through v1.24.10 with v1.25.0 coming in early 2026
93 repositories in the DDEV ecosystem
3,400+ GitHub stars on the core project
28 official add-ons
175 total add-ons

Thank You

Thanks to our amazing community: maintainer Stas Zhuk, contributors like tyler36, GuySartorelli, Hanoii, Bernardo Martinez, Ralf Koller, and many others. Thanks to our many crucial sponsors including Tag1, Upsun, Passbolt, Agiledrop, and all individual supporters.

And thanks to all of you who use DDEV, report issues, answer questions in Discord and other venues, and spread the word. Your support makes this project possible.

Looking Ahead

Stay tuned for our 2026 plans post where we’ll outline what’s next for DDEV. As always, we welcome your input through all our support venues.