Testing with DDev, Gitlab, and serving Drupal from a subfolder instead of a subdomain

brooke — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 18:42:10 +0000

While working on the Easy Breadcrumb module for Drupal, I came across a situation where a test was failling on Gitlab but was passing with DDev: https://www.drupal.org/project/easy_breadcrumb/issues/3615550

The difference that mattered was that Gitlab serves the site from http://localhost/web for testing and locally it gets served from a fully qualified domain name, ie. http://ddev.site.example.com.

Getting the test to fail locally

Using firecow/gitlab-ci-local

To get the test to fail locally, I used the suggestions at https://project.pages.drupalcode.org/gitlab_templates/info/test-locally/ , which suggested firecow/gitlab-ci-local . I did get that working but I ran into a hitch. My work computer is a Mac with an ARM64 chip and gitlab-ci-local tries to install selenium/standalone-chrome:127.0, which doesn't support ARM64. I dug around and figured out that I could use selenium/standalone-chromium:latest instead by adding a few lines in .gitlab-ci.yml:

phpunit:
  services:
    - !reference [.with-database]
    - name: selenium/standalone-chromium:latest
      alias: selenium
      
# The lines below are to filter which tests run. In this case, only tests in the
# "redirect" group.
variables:
  _PHPUNIT_TESTGROUPS: "redirect"

Then, on the command line, to just run PHPUnit and not most of the other steps, I used the --stage flag to just run jobs in the test stage, which by default is just PHPUnit:

$ drupal-ci-local --stage=test

That worked and I was able to reproduce locally. But, it took about a minute to run the test instead of 2 or 3 seconds with DDev.

Using DDEV to serve a Drupal site from a subdirectory instead of a subdomain

This way is not perfect, but it worked well enough for me to use Xdebug when running tests and when browing the site in a browser.

The code below results in the site being served from a subdirectory named easy, ie. http://example.com/easy.

First, cd to root of project, then:

mkdir router
ls -s ./web ./router/easy

Then, in .ddev/config.yaml

docroot: router

Next, in settings.php

if (isset($GLOBALS['request'])) {
 $request = $GLOBALS['request'];
 $script_name = $request->server->get('SCRIPT_NAME');
 if ($script_name === '/easy/index.php' || $script_name === '/index.php') {
   $request->server->set('SCRIPT_NAME', '/easy/index.php');
 }
}

Then, in .ddev/nginx_full/nginx-site.conf, replace the section that starts with 'location /' to be like this instead:

   # 1. CSS/JS caches
   location ~* ^/easy/sites/.*/files/(css|js)/ {
       try_files $uri @rewrite;
       expires max;
       log_not_found off;
   }
   # 2. Image styles
   location ~* ^/easy/sites/.*/files/styles/ {
       try_files $uri @rewrite;
   }
   # 3. Clean URLs
   location /easy {
       try_files $uri $uri/ /easy/index.php?$query_string;
   }
   # 4. Fallback
   location @rewrite {
       rewrite ^/easy/(.*)$ /easy/index.php?$query_string;
   }

To run phpunit tests, pass in SIMPLETEST_BASE_URL.
Example which just runs ones test:

ddev exec SIMPLETEST_BASE_URL=http://localhost/easy vendor/bin/phpunit --bootstrap web/core/tests/bootstrap.php --filter testEasyBreadcrumbFollowRedirects web/modules/custom/easy_breadcrumb

brooke Mon, 10 Aug 2026 - 11:42

Bash scripts for Drupal, DDEV, and Tome

brooke — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 20:46:57 +0000

Bash scripts for Drupal, DDEV, and Tome

This website is made with Drupal. Local development is done with DDEV configured to use Orbstack for container management. The Tome Drupal module exports the dynamic site to a static site. Python is used to preview the site locally. Public hosting is provided free by Github.

Here are some custom bash aliases and functions I use to make common local tasks easy. Concurrently is used to run two processes in one terminal session.

alias brookemahoneycomCd='cd ~/Sites/brookemahoneycom'
brookemahoneycomLaunch () {
  # Starts Orbstack if it isn't running.
  orb
  brookemahoneycomCd
  cd drupal
  ddev launch
}

brookemahoneycomPreview () {
  brookemahoneycomCd
  cd docs
  concurrently 'python -m http.server' 'open "http://localhost:8000"'
}

brookemahoneycomBuild() {
  # Starts Orbstack if it isn't running.
  orb
  # Changes to the drupal directory.
  cd ~/Sites/brookemahoneycom/drupal
  # Clears caches.
  ddev drush cr
  # Exports the site with Tome.
  ddev drush tome:static --uri=https://brookemahoney.com
  # Removes old docs directory.
  rm -rf ~/Sites/brookemahoneycom/docs
  # Copies the Tome build directory to docs for Github hosting.
  cp -R ~/Sites/brookemahoneycom/drupal/html ~/Sites/brookemahoneycom/docs
  # Copies over static files, such as CNAME for Github hosting.
  cp -R ~/projects/brookemahoneycom/sync/ ~/Sites/brookemahoneycom/docs
}

All the code for the Drupal install is in this site's Github repo.

brooke Wed, 17 Sep 2025 - 13:46