Well, it's 2026, and it seems only fitting to kick the year off by wishing everyone a Happy 2026! Hasn't it been chilly? I've hardly taken off my black Code Enigma hoodie since starting back at work on Monday after a two week break. It's the warmest hoodie I own!
Apart from the cold, I had a good first week back working on some of our internal projects here at Code Enigma: updating some of our projects, and porting the local development stack over to DDEV, (Docker based PHP environments), all of which has been going smoothly so far.
DDEV
I hadn't used DDEV before, and I must say, I'm very impressive by it. Getting a project set up on DDEV takes seconds... literally. Here are the slightly simplified set of steps I have been following for most projects:
git checkout project && cd project && ddev config && ddev start
The `ddev config` step requires some user input (unless you pass it as arguments to the command), you need to chose the type of project you want to set up, I've been using Drupal11 and PHP, but for the most part, it has been that simple.
For a couple of projects, I had to update Nginx configuration, and this too, is really simple to achieve. All that is required is to follow the standard approach to customising DDEV configuration, which is to remove the `#ddev-generated` line from the default configuration file you want to customise. Doing so takes the file out of DDEV control and allows you to make any changes you need. For me, I've been adding an Nginx location block for SimpleSAMPphp.
It's also really easy to manage databases: to import a database dump, on the host, all you need to run is `ddev import-db --file=database.sql.gz`, and to create a new database, again, on the host, just run ddev mysql -uroot -proot and then, CREATE DATABASE mydatabase; and you're good to go.
Drupal Camp England
Plans are shaping up for 2026, too. A few of us at Code Enigma met today to discuss attending Drupal Camp England, which will take place at the end of February in Salford. Three of us plan to attend, and we're going to submit some session proposals, too. So, if you're going, it'll be great to see you there!
That's it for this update, hope you're having a great start to 2026!
Ps. I got a guitar for Christmas, so I'm learning Back in Black by AC/DC... I'll keep you posted on my progress 😂