My Go-To Setup for Local Drupal Development with DDEV and Colima

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As someone who frequently builds POCs and demos with Drupal, I’ve spent plenty of time spinning up local environments. A while back, I switched to DDEV as my go-to local dev tool after hearing great things—and it quickly became a core part of my workflow. It's fast, reliable, and makes managing Drupal projects a whole lot easier.

In this post, I’ll walk you through how I set up a fresh local Drupal site using DDEV. Whether you're new to DDEV or just looking to streamline your Drupal dev setup, these steps will get you up and running in no time.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, you'll need to have DDEV (and Colima) installed. You can follow the official instructions here:
👉 Get Started with DDEV

💡 Note: While DDEV recommends Orbstack as a Docker provider on macOS, I use Colima instead—it’s free, open source, and easy to set up.

Step-by-Step Setup

Once DDEV is installed and your Docker provider is running, here’s how I spin up a new Drupal environment:

Create a new project directory
```
mkdir my-drupal10-site
```
Then jump into that directory
```
cd my-drupal10-site
```

Configure DDEV for a Drupal 11 project

ddev config --project-type=drupal11 --docroot=web --create-docroot

Start the DDEV containers
```
ddev start
```

Create the Drupal project using Composer

ddev composer create drupal/recommended-project

Add Drush for command-line tooling

ddev composer require drush/drush

💡 Note: Sometimes I will run the above three commands at once with the following

ddev start && ddev composer create drupal/recommended-project && ddev composer require drush/drush

Install the Drupal site with admin credentials

ddev drush site:install --account-name=admin --account-pass=admin -y

Get a one-time login link (Optional)
```
ddev drush uli
```
Launch the site in your browser
```
ddev launch
```

And that’s it! In just a few commands, you’ll have a fully working local Drupal site.

Why I Like This Setup

There are a lot of reasons DDEV has become my go-to for local Drupal development:

Self-contained tooling: Composer, Drush, and other essential tools run inside the container—so there’s no need to clutter your host machine with global installs.
Environment mirroring: You can easily spin up supporting services like a headless front end, Redis, or Solr to replicate your production stack locally.
Hosting integration: DDEV includes built-in support for common hosting platforms. I use Pantheon, and with just a few commands, I can pull down databases and files from my live sites.
Effortless backups and refreshes: Whether you’re snapshotting your local database or refreshing your environment with new data, DDEV makes it simple. Snapshots are especially handy when testing config changes or migrations.
Developer-friendly experience: From custom commands to flexible add-ons, DDEV keeps your workflow clean, efficient, and consistent across teams and projects.

Wrapping Up

If you haven’t tried DDEV for your Drupal projects yet, I highly recommend giving it a shot. It takes the pain out of managing local environments and just works—whether you’re building a quick proof of concept or a large-scale enterprise site.

Got questions or a different setup you love? Let me know!

💡 Note: ChatGPT was used to assist in the writing of this article. Its contents have been vetted by me and the thoughts, statements, facts and figures within are my own. Thanks for reading!