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16 reasons DDEV will be your new favorite development environment Randy Fay Wed, 12/07/2022 - 03:00

In 2022, you have a wide variety of local development environments to choose from, whether you're a designer, developer, tester, or any kind of open source contributor. Because most of the tools and platforms contributors use happen to run on many different operating systems, you probably even have the choice of constructing your own environment. I'm the maintainer of DDEV, and here are 15 reasons I think you'll like it for your development environment.

1. Cross-platform

DDEV supports and tests, and has a fully automated test suite for Linux (amd64 and Arm), WSL2, Windows, and macOS (M1 and amd64.)

Some tools require you to use one exact version of Docker (and they may even take the liberty of installing it themselves), DDEV works with versions of Docker that are a couple of years old, and keeps up with the latest versions, as well. Alternatively, you can use Colima or Docker installed inside WSL2.

DDEV’s binaries are signed and notarized on macOS and Windows, so you never have to sneak around scary operating system warnings when installing and using DDEV.

2. Performance

The DDEV team believes that DDEV on macOS and Windows has the best performance you can get on any local development, both in terms of starting DDEV (10 to 20 seconds) and in terms of webserving. With no setup required at all, the Mutagen feature speeds up webserving by a factor of 10, at least. And of course on Linux (including WSL2) it's truly superb.

3. Settings file management

DDEV is happy to get you started quickly and easily, and even manage your settings files. You can use your own repository or follow one of the quickstart guides to create something new and you'll have a project going in no time. You can also turn off settings file management to fine-tune your team's approach when you need more customization.

DDEV's configuration files aren't used when they're not being used in a DDEV context, so your project won't accidentally have DDEV settings if you mistakenly deploy them to production. If you have the same project setup for Lando and DDEV, then the DDEV settings won't break Lando.

4. Trusted HTTPS

DDEV uses mkcert to allow you to conduct all your work using locally trusted HTTPS, just like it will work in the real world. You don't have to click around scary browser warnings to view your project in development.

5. Database snapshots

DDEV has the ddev snapshot feature, allowing you to quickly capture the state of your database and then quickly restore to a different point. You can name snapshots for different branches of your project. It's far faster than traditional export and import.

Programming and development Red Hat Developers Blog Programming cheat sheets Try for free: Red Hat Learning Subscription eBook: An introduction to programming with Bash Bash shell scripting cheat sheet eBook: Modernizing Enterprise Java An open source developer's guide to building applications 6. Simple single-binary installation without dependencies

DDEV is written in Go. Because Go is a fairly new language, this can be a bit of a disadvantage in terms of community involvement, but it's a huge advantage for cross-platform support. Go does cross-platform builds with ease, and the resulting self-contained binary has no dependencies at all (aside from Docker.) There are no libraries to install, no DLLs to maintain. And responsiveness to commands is excellent!

7. Xdebug step-debugging

Lots of people have their first experience with a real step-debugging environment for the first time with DDEV because it's really, really easy. Thanks to PHPStorm, there's no setup at all. With VSCode or Codium, there's about 2 minutes of setup. There's no need for inserting print statements into code anymore!

8. Explicit support for your CMS

DDEV has built-in support for many popular content management systems (CMS) and platforms. "Explicit support" means that there's setting management, and an NGINX configuration customized for the specific platform you're using. Here's a partial list of what's supported:

• Drupal
• Backdrop
• WordPress
• TYPO3
• Magento
• Laravel
• Shopware

9. Integration and add-ons

While DDEV provides explicit support with optional settings management for your CMS of choice, many developers use other platforms, including Symfony, Moodle, Mautic, and so on. DDEV has explicit support for NodeJS, both for processing and as daemons.

DDEV also features a library of supported, maintained, and tested add-ons for Redis, Solr, Memcached, Elasticsearch, Mongo, Varnish, and more.

10. Gitpod

Your local development environment doesn't even have to be local anymore. DDEV has full support for use in Gitpod so you can move your development into the cloud.

11. No vendor lock-in

There is absolutely no vendor lock-in in DDEV. The idea behind the DDEV platform is that DDEV can be plugged into a dev-to-deploy workflow as pieces of a puzzle that work for you. Mix and match! DDEV is an open source community project that works great with any hosting service you can use.

12. Respect for your host computer

DDEV doesn't assume you use your computer (or containers) only for DDEV.

Too many local dev tools happily reconfigure your host computer without your full involvement. More than one of them edit your /etc/exports file, with no way for you to opt out. A couple of them actually overwrite your Docker installation with a different version at install time. DDEV tries to ensure that in the unlikely situation that anything needs to be changed on your computer, you're the one doing it, and you have options.

For example, HTTPS support requires running mkcert -install one time. NFS support requires a bit of additional setup. Because nearly everything is run in a container, there's very little that needs to be done on the host computer in the first place.

13. Community

The DDEV community has been phenomenal through the years, contributing ideas, code, and shared support. There are open collections of DDEV services, tools, snippets, approaches, as well as blogs and presentations and more from users all around the world.

The DDEV Advisory Group provides oversight, direction, and feedback for the project. Anyone is welcome to join.

14. Open source

DDEV is a small cog in the huge open source ecosystem. It couldn't even exist without the hundreds or thousands of projects that make up the Linux containers that run it, and of course, PHP itself is a fundamental upstream project. We love to contribute upstream and downstream to projects like:

• Docker: DDEV is involved with the Docker project, because DDEV users are always pushing the limits. We participate heavily in Docker issue queues.
• Mutagen: When you edit code in containers, there's a lot of synchronization between your local host and the container environment that needs to happen. Mutagen helps bridge that gap for DDEV users.
• mkcert: The mkcert tool allows DDEV to provide trusted HTTPS in your local development environment. We've benefited enormously from it, and have contributed back tests and bug fixes.
• Xdebug: DDEV is great with Xdebug, and of course, we hear right away when there are problems. We report our findings back to the Xdebug issue queue.
• deb.sury.org PHP packages: The Debian PHP packages (5.6 all the way through 8.2, at the time of writing) we use come from deb.sury.org. Because the DDEV community is an early consumer of those packages, we're often in that issue queue too.

15. DDEV Keeps Up

DDEV is always keeping up with the dependencieis you need. For example, at this writing, neither PHP 8.2.0 nor Drupal 10 have yet been released, but both have been supported in DDEV for months.

16. Your own reason

I'd love to hear what makes DDEV your favorite, and the DDEV team is always listening to hear what you want in the future. Of course, we also want to hear when things don't work the way you want or expect. Visit our Git repository to contribute!

Note: This is an updated version of a blog post that originally appeared on ddev.com.

What's so different about DDEV? It's a container-based local development environment. Here are a few reasons you should give it a try.

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CC BY 3.0 US Mapbox Uncharted ERG

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Why I use the Enlightenment file manager on Linux Seth Kenlon Wed, 12/07/2022 - 03:00

Computers are like filing cabinets, full of virtual folders and files waiting to be referenced, cross-referenced, edited, updated, saved, copied, moved, renamed, and organized. In this series, I'm taking a look at the Enlightenment file manager for your Linux system.

The Enlightenment desktop is designed to be a modern implementation of what's considered a traditional UNIX desktop. There are certain elements that are considered to be characteristic of graphical UNIX, most of which were defined in the by early desktops like CDE or twm. Enlightenment implements things like a dock, an on-demand global contextual menu, flexible focus, virtual workspaces, but with an almost hyper-modern flair. Enlightenment is able to combine these elements with effects and animations because it's also its own compositor, and the EFL libraries that the desktop uses are specific to Enlightenment and maintained by the Enlightenment team. That's a long way of confessing that in this entry in my file manager series, I'm looking at a file manager that's mostly inextricable from the desktop it supports. If you want to try Enlightenment's file manager, you have to try Enlightenment. Luckily, it's a pleasant experience, and a fun diversion from the usual desktops.

Install Enlightenment on Linux

You can probably install Enlightenment from your distribution's repository. For example, on Fedora:

$ sudo dnf install enlightenment

On Debian and similar:

$ sudo apt install enlightenmentFile manager

When you first log in to Enlightenment, you must make some choices about configuration. After setting your language and visual theme, you can open a file manager window by either double-clicking on the Home icon on the desktop, or by clicking on the desktop and choosing Navigate.

Image by:

(Seth Kenlon, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Customizing the panel

The left panel of the file manager displays common places in your file system. Not everyone considers the same places common, though, so you're free to change the bookmarks in the panel to suit your needs.

Start by removing the items you don't need. For instance, maybe you don't need an icon for your Desktop in your side panel. To remove it, right-click on it and select Delete. You're asked for confirmation, and it's safe to accept. You're not deleting your actual desktop or the items on it, you're just removing the Desktop item from the side panel. You can remove any of the items from the left panel in this way.

Next, add directories you frequent. You can add items by dragging and dropping icons from the right panel into the left. Once there, they're considered bookmarks for Enlightenment's file manager. These items don't carry over into other file managers or file choosers. This is a bookmarks panel specific to the Enlightenment file manager.

More Linux resources Linux commands cheat sheet Advanced Linux commands cheat sheet Free online course: RHEL technical overview Linux networking cheat sheet SELinux cheat sheet Linux common commands cheat sheet What are Linux containers? Our latest Linux articles Customizing the view

A file manager's main purpose is to help you manage files. Part of managing files is getting a good look at what you have, and there are three different views Enlightenment offers. To access the different views, right-click in an empty space in the file manager and choose View Mode.

• Custom Icons: Place icons anywhere in the file manager window you please.

• Grid: Sort icons, aligned to a grid.

• List: Sort small icons as an itemized list.

In addition to altering your view of the icons representing your files and folders, you can control how they're sorted. The default is to alphabetize directories first, and then files. You can right-click in an empty space in the file manager and select Sorting to choose between other options:

• Size: This is particularly useful when you're trying to find files that are occupying too much space on your hard drive.

• File extension: Group files together by file type!

• Modification time: Make recent files easy find.

Grouping files together by file extension is the real epiphany of the Enlightenment file manager. In most other file managers, the closest you can get to this feature is the ability to filter files by manually typing in the extension you're interested in. But with this feature, your files "cluster" together by a sort of genealogical affinity. It makes files really easy to find without giving any particular preference to any one group of file types. You just locate the group of files you're interested in, and then the single file you want to work on.

Keyboard navigation

The Enlightenment file manager has good keyboard support. As long as the file manager is in focus, you can press any Arrow key to move between items in the right panel. Press Return to enter a directory or to open a file.

You can use Alt and the Left Arrow key to move back to the previously visited directory. Use Alt and the Up Arrow key to move to your current directory's parent.

The Enlightenment experience

Enlightenment is a fun and beautiful desktop, and its default file manager does everything you need a file manager to do. It's got the essential customization options, good support for keyboard navigation, and it fits the rest of the desktop perfectly. If you're in the mood for something different, then give Enlightenment a try.

The Enlightenment file manager for Linux has essential customization options, good support for keyboard navigation, and it fits the rest of the desktop perfectly.

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The post A Career in Linux is What You Should Be Pursuing In 2023 first appeared on Tecmint: Linux Howtos, Tutorials & Guides .

Brief: In this guide, we explore reasons why you should consider a career in Linux in 2023 and beyond. Linux turned 31 last year, as you can imagine it’s been an eventful journey. It

The post A Career in Linux is What You Should Be Pursuing In 2023 first appeared on Tecmint: Linux Howtos, Tutorials & Guides.

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