Local development environments are in the midst a bit of a renaissance recently - mainly driven by the maturation and adoption of Docker-based solutions.

I've been using (and recommending) DDEV for awhile now, and one of the things that I really like about it is the consistent pace of development. Since early February, there have been three minor releases of DDEV (1.6, 1.7, and 1.8). With each minor release of DDEV comes new, often very useful features. Here's just a few of my recent favorites:

NFS Mounting

One of the few disadvantages of using a Docker-based solution over a native local development solution is often the performance (depending on your operating system and hardware). In the DDEV 1.6 release, NFS mounting was introduced - this is a method to mount the DDEV Docker containers using NFS instead of the default Docker mount - resulting in significant performance gains. While using NFS mounting does involve a one-time system -setup, the results are well worth it.

Windows Chocolatey support

For Windows users, Chocolatey is similar to Homebrew for Mac OS X. With DDEV 1.6, you can now install DDEV using Chocolatey from the command line.

Local DDEV config files

If you're working in a team environment, then having a local DDEV config file is a huge advantage. Prior to DDEV 1.7, if you wanted to utilize a DDEV post-start hook, it had to be configured in .ddev/config.yaml. In a team environment, this file is shared among all developers, so everyone would share the same post-start hook (even if they didn't want it). Starting in DDEV 1.7, you can have your own .ddev/config.local.yaml with only your additions or modifications to .ddev/config.yaml. For example, if you want to add a post-start hook and not share it with the rest of your team, just create a .ddev/config.local.yaml file and add it there.

Easy local https by default!

It is pretty much standard practice these days to have your production environment only available via https. It only makes sense that your local development environments should behave in the same manner. In DDEV 1.8, support for the most-excellent mkcert project was added, so with a one-time, super-easy mkcert installation on your host operating system, DDEV will automatically default to providing you with an https connection to your local development environment. 

There's a lot of great reasons to use DDEV (check out more of them in my DDEV book!), and it is exciting to know that every six weeks or so, we'll be getting new ones with each DDEV release.