From XAMPP to DDEV: Modernizing PHP Developer Environments

Setting up a PHP development environment used to be a rite of passage — and not the fun kind.

When I joined the team, the local dev setup had grown organically over the years — XAMPP on Windows, manual SSL certificates, environment variables scattered across .htaccess files. Six developers, all with subtly different configurations.

The problem

The worst part wasn't the setup itself — it was onboarding. Getting a new developer productive took 1–2 full days of hand-holding: installing the right PHP version, configuring Apache virtual hosts, mapping drive letters, fighting with Xdebug config.

Every developer had a slightly different environment, which meant bugs that were genuinely environment-specific.

The solution: WSL + DDEV + Docker

DDEV is an open-source local development environment tool built on Docker. It gives every project a reproducible, containerised environment defined entirely in .ddev/config.yaml — committed to the repo.

Combined with WSL2 (Windows Subsystem for Linux), we got:

Consistent environments — the same Docker image on every machine
Per-project PHP versions — no more global PHP installation conflicts
Built-in Xdebug — one command to enable/disable
Mailpit — local email catching out of the box

The migration

The migration itself took about a week:

Documented the existing setup (PHP version, Apache vhosts, env vars, Xdebug config)
Created a .ddev/config.yaml translating every piece of that config
Tested against the existing codebase end-to-end
Wrote a setup guide (a single README section: install WSL2, install Docker Desktop, install DDEV, run ddev start)
Ran a 2-hour workshop with the team

Results

Onboarding time dropped from 1–2 days to 1–2 hours. The environment is now fully reproducible: any developer can check out the repo and have a working local setup with one command.

I also contributed a bug fix back to the DDEV project (PR #6809) while doing the migration — a small way to give back to the tool that saved us hours.

Takeaways

The upfront investment in a reproducible environment pays off immediately at hiring time
DDEV's .ddev/ directory in version control is the key — no more "ask the guy who set it up originally"
Running a short workshop beats documentation alone; people need to do the setup once with someone watching