Skip to content

In-container Configuration

In-Container home directory and shell configuration

Custom shell configuration (bash or your preferred shell), your usual git configuration, a composer auth.json and more can be achieved within your containers. Place all your dotfiles in your global~/.ddev/homeadditions or your project's .ddev/homeadditions directory and DDEV will use these in your project's web containers. (Note that there is also a hidden/transient .ddev/.homeadditions; this is used for processing global homeadditions and should be ignored.)

On ddev start, ddev attempts to create a user inside the web and db containers with the same name and use id as the one you have on the host.

DDEV looks for the homeadditions directory either in ~/.ddev/homeadditions (the global .ddev directory) or the .ddev/homeadditions directory of a particular project, and will copy their contents recursively into the in-container home directory during ddev start. (Note that project homeadditions contents override the global homeadditions.)

Usage examples:

  • If you use git inside the container, you may want to copy your ~/.gitconfig into ~/.ddev/homeadditions or the project's .ddev/homeadditions so that use of git inside the container will use your regular username and email, etc.
  • If you need to add a script or other executable component into the project (or global configuration), you can put it in the project or global .ddev/homeadditions/bin directory and ~/bin/<script will be created inside the container. This is useful for adding a script to a project or to every project, or for overriding standard scripts, as ~/bin is first in the $PATH in the web container.
  • If you use private password-protected composer repositories with satis, for example, and use a global auth.json, you might want to cp ~/.composer/auth.json into .ddev/homeadditions/.composer/auth.json, but be careful that you exclude it from checking using a .gitignore or equivalent.
  • Some people have specific configuration needs for their .ssh/config. If you provide your own .ssh/config though, please make sure it includes these lines:
    UserKnownHostsFile=/home/.ssh-agent/known_hosts
StrictHostKeyChecking=no
  • You can add small scripts to the .bashrc.d directory and they will be executed on ddev ssh. For example, add a ~/.ddev/homeadditions/.bashrc.d/whereami containing echo "I am in the $(hostname) container" and (after ddev restart) when you ddev ssh that will be executed.
  • If you have a favorite .bashrc, copy it in to either the global or project homeadditions.
  • If you like the traditional ll bash alias for ls -l, add a .ddev/homeadditions/.bash_aliases with these contents:
    alias ll="ls -lhA"

Caveats:

  • Absolute symlinks inside a homeadditions directory won't work because they can't be resolved inside the container.
Last update: 2022-03-22