Blog: Manually managing tool versions and adding custom utilities

Author: bserem

public/img/blog/2025/06/ddev-tool-install.png

@@ -0,0 +1,14 @@
+---
+name: Bill Seremetis
+firstName: Bill
+avatarUrl: http://seremetis.net/static/bill.jpg
+---
+
+[Bill](https://www.drupal.org/u/bserem) is the Managed Services team’s Tech Lead
+in [Annertech](https://www.annertech.com), a long time Drupal developer and 
+DDEV user.
+His career started as a site builder, but quickly turned into systems administrator
+and backend developer. He loves steering conversations towards workable solutions
+and improving developer's lives.
+
+When not behind a screen you'll find him holding a camera and climbing easy routes.

src/content/authors/bill-seremetis.md

@@ -0,0 +1,53 @@
+
+---
+title: "Customizing or expanding bundled DDEV tools"
+pubDate: 2025-06-12
+summary: How to upgrade/downgrade a utility provided by DDEV, or add a custom one for a given project
+author: Bill Seremetis
+featureImage:
+  src: /img/blog/2025/06/ddev-tool-install.png
+  alt: "Installing custom software packages in the containerized environment"
+  shadow: true
+categories:
+  - Guides
+  - DevOps
+---
+
+_This guest post is by DDEV community member and [Drupal](https://drupal.org)
+contributor [Bill Seremetis](/blog/author/bill-seremetis/) and sponsored by
+[Annertech](https://www.annertech.com)._
+
+DDEV comes bundled with a predefined set of tools, like `composer` for managing
+your PHP projects, `terminus`, `platform` and `acli` for specific hosting environments
+and of course tools specific to projects, such as `wp-cli`.
+
+Most of the time, these tools work as expected, and you have nothing to worry about.
+
+## Manually managing versions of bundled tools
+
+Sometimes though you might need a very specific version of a tool. Maybe you 
+[are running an older PHP version](https://github.com/pantheon-systems/terminus/releases/tag/4.0.0)
+or the bundled version [has a bug that ruins things for you](https://github.com/platformsh/cli/discussions/166).
+Newer DDEV versions won't fix your need to run an older version, and 
+sometimes it makes no sense to wait if you need a newer version.
+
+We can specify which version to use on a given project by overriding the one
+provided by DDEV easily by using a custom Dockerfile:
+
+```dockerfile
+# .ddev/web-build/Dockerfile.terminus
+# Terminus 4 drops support for PHP 8.1 which we still need
+ARG TERMINUS_VERSION="3.6.2"
+RUN curl -L --fail -o /usr/local/bin/terminus https://github.com/pantheon-systems/terminus/releases/download/${TERMINUS_VERSION}/terminus.phar && chmod +x /usr/local/bin/terminus
+```
+
+## Installing custom tools
+
+You can obviously use the same trick to install custom tools:
+
+```dockerfile
+# .ddev/web-build/Dockerfile.fzf
+# fooscript relies on fzf
+ARG FZF_VERSION="0.62.0"
+RUN curl -s -L https://github.com/junegunn/fzf/releases/download/v${FZF_VERSION}/fzf-${FZF_VERSION}-linux_amd64.tar.gz | tar xvz -C /usr/local/bin/ && chmod +x /usr/local/bin/fzf
+```