Working from the host¶

Inside DDEV, ddev composer always reads the overlay. On the host, a bare composer, drush or php runs the host binary, which bypasses DDEV and ignores the overlay. Two things help with that.

Shell helpers (recommended)¶

The add-on ships a script with shell functions for composer, drush, dr, php, phpunit, phpstan, phpcs and cspell. Inside a DDEV project, each one runs the ddev command of the same name. Anywhere else, it runs the host binary.

Add this to your ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc:

source /path/to/your/project/.ddev/drupal-dev/shell-helpers.sh

The add-on prints the exact line for your project when it is installed. One project's copy works for every DDEV project, since the functions look for .ddev/config.yaml from the current directory upwards.

direnv¶

The add-on creates an .envrc file in the project root. If you use direnv, allow it once:

direnv allow

This sets COMPOSER=composer.local.json on the host, so a host composer uses the overlay too. direnv cannot export shell functions, so you still need the shell helpers above to run the tools through DDEV.

Tab completion¶

With DDEV's shell completion set up, Tab completes: