Using DDEV Offline¶
Make sure to do a ddev start on every project you want to use before going offline
To work offline, you have to already have any needed Docker images pulled. That means you should do a ddev start on all of the projects before going offline.
DDEV attempts to work smoothly offline, and you shouldn’t have to do anything to make it work.
However, it cannot pull needed Docker images when offline if a new Docker image is required, so you’ll want to make sure that you try a ddev start before going offline to make sure everything has been pulled.
If you have a project running when you’re online (using DNS for name resolution) and you then go offline, do a ddev restart to get the hostname added into /etc/hosts for name resolution.
You have some general options as well:
In .ddev/config.yaml, use_dns_when_possible: false will make DDEV never try to use DNS for resolution, instead adding hostnames to /etc/hosts. You can also use ddev config --use-dns-when-possible=false to set this configuration option.
You can also set up a local DNS server like dnsmasq (Linux and macOS, brew install dnsmasq) or (unbound or many others on Windows) in your own host environment that serves the project_tld that you choose, and DNS resolution will work fine. You’ll likely want a wildcard A record pointing to 127.0.0.1 on most DDEV installations. If you use dnsmasq, you must configure it to allow DNS rebinding.
To understand what’s going on with name resolution and your browser and offline use, we recommend Hostnames and Wildcards and DDEV Oh My! on ddev.com.
Administrative Privileges Required
If you ddev start when offline, DDEV will try to add <projectname>.ddev.site to your /etc/hosts file. You must have administrative privileges to edit the hosts file on any operating system.
Oddities of using buildx docker-container driver
This is an unusual situation, mostly encountered by DDEV developers who have been pushing images, but you may not be able to work offline if your docker buildx inspect shows the docker-container driver, and you’ll need to switch to a builder that has the docker driver. docker buildx ls will show available drivers, or you can switch to one with docker buildx create --name docker-driver --driver docker --use. This is reported in docker buildx issue.