Blog: Using VS Code with Remote Explorer and DDEV

[rfay]

@ultimike's technique for using VS Code with DDEV is different and interesting. After ddev start uses the Remote Explorer to interact with the entire webserver environment inside the web container. He's spoken about this a number of times, as in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6yqx2hwUPY

Having a more official and maintained place for this would be good, a blog post is a good spot. It's not hard, and DDEV has good support.

Use the private link to his google doc as well.

I had hoped to provide new guidance on using the Devcontainers extension with VS Code and a new multi-arch image, see

• build: Provide new multi-arch ddev-devcontainers-base image to replace ddev-gitpod-base, for #6891 [skip ci] ddev#6977

But I'm pretty much stuck on that. However, it's probably me just being stuck because I'm trying to make it work for Codespaces along with everywhere else.

There is also a BoF scheduled for Drupalcon Atlanta 2025 on the topic of improving DDEV support for VS Code.

[jgonyea]

I could take a stab at a "Living off the Land" sort of post covering the remote explorer development environment vs the more typical local-based one.

(unless you'd prefer to have the devcontainers PR done first)

[rfay]

Remote Explorer is the most important. Would love to have you do that. Have you taken @ultimike's class or seen his notes (or watched his many videos on this?)

[jgonyea]

No, I watched the video mentioned in the issue. I did something similar a long time ago when I was running virtualbox and vagrant setups (pre-docker): installing all tools into the virtualized environment and then hooking up the desktop app tooling into the VM.

Definitely a neat twist on ddev setups.

[rfay]

Exploring it would be awesome!

[rfay]

Update: @ultimike published the Drupal version of this whole thing today at https://www.drupaleasy.com/blogs/ultimike/2025/04/drupal-development-using-visual-studio-code-connected-directly-ddevs-web