The Story of DDEV

DDEV is a local development environment for web developers. It originated within the company “Drud” in about 2016. Drud was building a general-purpose CLI for its infant web hosting product (named “DDEV-Live”, with the local dev tool named “DDEV-Local”), and was visionary enough to build local development into the idea. (Nobody really remembers what “DDEV” stands for, it might be “Docker development” or it might have been “Drud development”.)

The independent value of the tool was soon recognized and it was refactored into its own repository, and then made open-source and it began its journey. Randy Fay was an employee of Drud in this period, and as a long-time proponent of local development and debugging was sold on its value. Drud graciously sponsored Randy to work on DDEV for nearly five years, until it lost its funding. DDEV of course had integration to Drud’s hosting product during this period, and it was seen as a way to bring developers into the Drud-hosting world.

The company Drud (by then renamed “DDEV”) shut down in 2021 when it lost its venture funding. Randy Fay continued to maintain the project without interruption.

In 2022, Platform.sh stepped in as a major sponsor of DDEV, continuing through its transition to the Upsun brand, although at a lower level.

In 2023, Stas Zhuk came aboard as an additional full-time maintainer and has made amazing and constant contributions to the project.

DDEV is an open-source project, free to all, and now has community governance via the DDEV Foundation and its Board of Directors.