Comparison blog explaining differences between WordPress-specific Local Dev and DDEV

[rfay]

It would help people to understand the strengths and weaknesses of WordPress local dev tools like Local WP and DDEV.

Context in related blogs

• Why Use DDEV Instead of Rolling Your Own
• What's So Different About DDEV

@nickchomey would you consider doing a blog on this topic? It's hard for those of us less knowledgable in the subject area.

[nickchomey]

I'd be happy to. I probably can't get to it soon, but I will certainly do it.

(also, I'd like to explore the tailscale addon first, as well as try again to make a better docker-based cloudflare tunnels addon. They're not directly related to doing wp local dev, but still important and I'd want to highlight them as extra perks of using ddev)

[rfay]

It would be lovely to have your perspective on WP local dev.

[nickchomey]

Though, now that I think of it some more, I don't think there's anything particularly unique to say about ddev and wp. In fact, as I've said many times, ddev's wp support is actually quite poor, due to how it sets up it's custom wp-config files that create friction when importing an existing site. My hacky wp addon helps with this, but it needs polishing.

If I had succeeded in getting relative urls to work for wp via traefik middlewares (I had 99% success but the edge cases made it not worth the effort. Maybe I'll revive it someday and invite edge case contributions. Though, any edge cases at all cause issues in the database, so it's sort of an all or nothing affair...), it would definitely have been a major selling point for using ddev with wp.

Conversely, LocalWP is a much more pleasant experience for wp development. Unless you're on windows, in which case it is unbearably slow (and much worse than other options like wamp, xamp, vvv and especially laragon - but they're all bad). Wsl2 is by far a better experience, which then makes ddev a primary option.

And then there's just the general, cms-agnostic features of ddev that make it attractive - db snapshots, adding redis is a common thing for wp "object caching", etc... It's nice that we can easily add elasticseaech etc, but that's pretty niche. Xdebug, xhgui and php-spx are hugely helpful as well. But, again, these are not wp-specific.

Most wp "devs" just want an easy way to work on their blogs/brochure sites, and local is fine for that if you're not on windows.

So, as it stands, I don't actually see any point in writing a ddev+wp blog post. If ddev wants to overhaul the wp support to make it frictionless to import existing wp sites (by using/respecting their wp-config file), I'd be happy to collaborate and then perhaps write a blog post. My addon would be a good starting point.

[rfay]

I wasn't proposing a ddev+wp blog post, was talking about a comparison of DDEV and things like "Local", strengths and weaknesses.

[nickchomey]

Gotcha. I'll give it some thought and try to write something at some point. WSL2 is definitely incomparably better for any windows-based development, and especially if you want to do anything beyond basic blog/brochure.

[nickchomey]

Would some sort of "My Road to DDEV" blog be useful, where I'd go through all the tools I tried before arriving at and staying with ddev? I could address how Local and similar tools are more user/beginner friendly. But that they're ultimately very limited. Moreover, ddev is really not that inaccessible - the commands are straightforward, and the vscode extension seems to work well (I just use the cli).

And ddev more than makes up for any extra difficulty by just being far more performant and flexible, let's you more closely mimic your production server environment with redis etc, and makes it easy to use xdebug, xhgui, php-spx etc

And, also, learning a bit about the terminal and Linux just makes you a much more capable developer.

Probably summarizing that if you just have a brochure site or blog, then Local etc are probably fine - especially if you use mac or Linux. But if you have a dynamic application (be it woocommerce, courses etc..) then you really ought to move to something more full-featured, and ddev is the best tool for that.

[rfay]

That would be a welcome approach!