How can I make in-container tools like drush or typo3cms usable if they're not in the standard DDEV PATH?

Question

I have a nonstandard composer layout, so some of my tools are in docroot/vendor/bin instead of the expected vendor/bin, so they're not in the $PATH inside the web container, and tools like ddev drush or ddev typo3cms don't work right because they can't find the tool. What can I do?

Answer 1

There are at least a couple of ways to solve this problem. The simplest is probably to just symlink your tool(s) into /usr/local/bin where they will easily be found. There are at least a couple of ways to do this. (Note that for most projects, the best long-term solution is to use a standard composer layout with the composer.json in the project root and the vendor directory in the project root, but we all know we can't fix everything. But vendor/bin is always in the $PATH.. so that's the usual easiest way to do this.)

1. Symlink in a post-start hook: We can add a post-start hook to symlink typo3cms (for example) into /usr/local/bin and ddev typo3cms will find the tool. Add something like this to .ddev/config.yaml

hooks:
  post-start:
  - exec: ln -s /var/www/html/docroot/vendor/bin/typo3cms /usr/local/bin

2. Symlink in a .ddev/web-build/Dockerfile: To add a symlink to drush, for example, in a nonstandard location and make ddev drush work, add this file as .ddev/web-build/Dockerfile:

ARG BASE_IMAGE
FROM $BASE_IMAGE

RUN ln -s /var/www/html/docroot/vendor/bin/drush /usr/local/bin

I'm sure there are many other ways to do this, by manipulating the $PATH inside the container (by adding .bashrc inside the homeadditions feature)