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Local Development Environments#

Even though Lagoon has only a hard dependency on Docker and Docker Compose (which is mostly shipped with Docker) there are some things which are nice for local development that are not included in Docker:

  • An HTTP reverse proxy for nice URLs and HTTPS offloading.
  • A DNS system so we don't have to remember IP addresses.
  • SSH agents to use SSH keys within containers.
  • A system that receives and displays mail locally.
Warning

You do not need to install Lagoon locally to use it locally! That sounds confusing but follow the documentation. Lagoon is the system that deploys your local development environment to your production environment, it's not the environment itself.

pygmy, DDEV, or Lando - the choice is yours#

pygmy#

Lagoon has traditionally worked best with pygmy , which is a preconfigured system of the above tools and works out of the box with Lagoon. It lives at https://github.com/pygmystack/pygmy

pygmy is written in Golang, so to install it, run:

Install with HomeBrew
brew tap pygmystack/pygmy && brew install pygmy

For detailed usage or installation info on pygmy, see its documentation.

Lando#

Lagoon is well-integrated with Lando! For more information, please see the documentation at https://docs.lando.dev/config/lagoon.html to get yourself up and running.

Lando's workflow for Lagoon will be familiar to users of Lando, and will also be the easiest way for Lagoon newcomers to get up and running. Pygmy presents a closer integration with Docker, which will lend itself better to more complex scenarios and use cases but will also require a deeper understanding.

DDEV#

Lagoon is also supported on DDEV! Check out their documentation to get started: https://ddev.readthedocs.io/en/stable/users/providers/lagoon/.

We have previously evaluated adding support for other systems like Docksal and Docker4Drupal, and while we may add support for these in the future, our current focus is on supporting our current tools.