fidzu : Drupal

Drupal is now light-years ahead of its reputation. Closing that gap is our #1 challenge, and it was the main message of my DrupalCon Rotterdam keynote.

Just over two years ago, I launched Drupal Starshot. I did it because I wasn't sure we could still innovate like we used to. It turns out we can.

Starshot became Drupal CMS, which brings together Site Templates, Recipes, Drupal AI, Drupal Canvas and more to make building websites easier.

Alongside that work, Drupal Core has become a faster and better framework for developers. A stronger Drupal Core helps us build a better Drupal CMS, while building Drupal CMS has driven further improvements in Drupal Core.

Unfortunately, many people outside the Drupal community haven't seen what Drupal can do today. In Rotterdam, I showed how far we have come and where we're going next, and we launched an advocacy program to help more people see how great Drupal has become.

If you missed the keynote, you can watch the video below or download my slides (86 MB).

More ways to reach more people

The first part of my keynote showed improvements for multilingual sites, JavaScript front-ends, headless Canvas, and Drupal AI.

Drupal has long had strong multilingual capabilities, but Drupal Canvas, our powerful new page builder, didn't yet support multilingual sites. Not only did we add multilingual support to Canvas, but we made all multilingual sites easier to set up.

React has one of the world's largest developer communities. Drupal Canvas code components are written in React, and we designed the developer experience around the tools, patterns, and workflows front-end JavaScript developers already know. They can use their preferred development tools, including modern AI-assisted workflows, without having to learn Drupal-specific concepts or conventions. We've continued to make that experience better, lowering the barrier for a much larger community of developers to build with Drupal.

At DrupalCon, we extended that same model with Drupal Canvas Headless. Developers can now use Drupal to manage content while building the front-end separately with frameworks like Next.js, Astro, TanStack, Angular, or Nuxt. Editors still get the visual experience of Drupal Canvas: they can build pages in Drupal and preview exactly how those pages will appear on the front-end.

This changes an important trade-off. Teams no longer have to choose between a modern JavaScript front-end and Drupal Canvas' visual authoring experience. They can have both. That opens Drupal to more developers, more front-end architectures, and more types of projects.

Drupal AI is moving so fast that I could have filled a whole keynote with it. Instead, we launched a new Drupal AI demo where people can experience Drupal AI for themselves. It comes preconfigured, making it easy to explore what Drupal AI can do or even show it to customers.

With the latest Drupal AI, you can ask questions and get answers grounded in your site's content. You can audit your content against brand guidelines, translate content, classify content, build pages and React components with AI, and more. Through MCP, AI assistants can work with Drupal content from outside Drupal.

What excites me most is the foundation underneath all of this. Drupal AI turns Drupal into an AI harness: organizations can connect AI models to structured content, tools, and workflows, while keeping control through permissions, guardrails, observability, metering, and a choice of AI models.

Opening Drupal's capabilities to other software

The second part of my keynote looked at another important shift: AI assistants can give people a new way to work with Drupal.

In one demo, an editor simply asked an AI assistant to unpublish a page. They didn't need to know where to click or understand Drupal's revisions, moderation workflows, or permissions. The assistant translated their intent into action, but Drupal remained in control: it checked whether the editor was allowed to unpublish the page and applied the site's publishing rules, just as it would if they had done it by hand.

If you want to see the demo in more detail, Scott Falconer, who worked on it, recorded a behind-the-scenes walkthrough showing how to set it up yourself, what happens under the hood, and how to get involved.

That demo was built on the Tool module, which I believe is one of the most important modules for Drupal developers to watch. Drupal modules already contain thousands of useful capabilities: publishing content, managing users, processing media, changing configuration, and much more. The Tool module gives developers a standard way to expose those capabilities so AI assistants and other software can discover and use them.

Today, exposing existing capabilities as tools can still require too much code. My own album module didn't expose tools, and making its existing capabilities available to an AI assistant took about 1,000 additional lines of code.

But once those tools were available, the value became obvious. Adding MCP support has already changed how I manage the more than 10,000 photos on my site. Tasks that used to take a lot of time can now be done much faster and more accurately with an AI assistant, while Drupal still manages the content, permissions, and workflows underneath.

That experience reinforced something I wrote about in AI and the great CMS unbundling: AI can take on more of the execution work while Drupal remains the control layer. I expect more organizations will want to manage parts of their sites through AI assistants. AI can make complex tasks much faster and easier without giving up the structure, governance, and safeguards that Drupal provides.

I believe thousands of module developers will eventually want to expose their capabilities in the same way, so I've been working with Matt Glaman to make it much easier. Matt has been developing a change to the Tool API that lets developers expose existing PHP methods as tools using attributes.

The idea is simple: add PHP attributes to an existing method to describe its name, purpose, inputs and outputs. In my album module, roughly 1,000 lines of integration code became about 20 attributes. My site already uses the experimental branch, and we're working to get it merged into the Tool module proper.

And this isn't only about AI. The same tools can be called by AI assistants over MCP, by other applications over HTTP, or used to generate schemas for JavaScript components and connect Drupal modules to workflow systems like ECA, FlowDrop, and Maestro. The video below shows FlowDrop using capabilities exposed by my album module:

Talk louder about Drupal

In the last part of my keynote, I came back to Drupal's reputation gap. We can make enormous progress with Drupal, but that doesn't automatically change what people or AI agents think of it. For example, an AI coding agent I tested in June didn't even mention Drupal CMS or Site Templates when it evaluated Drupal.

Over the past few years, much of my personal focus has been on accelerating innovation in Drupal. That work is paying off, and we have real product momentum. I'm now shifting more of my attention to the other side of the equation: making sure people see what we've built, understand what has changed, and know why it matters.

So I announced the Drupal Advocacy Program, led by the Drupal Association.

Drupal already has a contribution credit system. It recognizes the people who contribute to Drupal and the organizations that support their work. For businesses, those credits also help determine visibility in the Drupal marketplace. Until now, we've been much better at recognizing technical contributions and financial support than advocacy work.

The new Drupal Advocacy Program will change that. Advocacy work can now earn contribution credit, and work that reaches people outside the existing Drupal community can earn more weight.

If we want to close Drupal's reputation gap, we can't only talk to people who already know Drupal well. We need more talks at external events, articles in broader publications, customer stories, demos, tutorials, and other work that helps people see what Drupal can do today.

Blue Drop Labs is a good example of what I mean. The day after the DriesNote, they published a post on building a website with Drupal CMS and Canvas Headless. The project itself was already live, but they quickly turned that work into a story others could learn from, with demos showing how editors and developers work with Drupal today.

That is exactly what I mean by "talking louder". There is already a lot of impressive Drupal work happening. We need to do a better job of showing it to the world.

I was a little nervous about announcing the Advocacy Program. We've wrestled with Drupal's reputation gap for a long time, and I felt we needed to do more than acknowledge it. Using contribution credit to reward advocacy was a concrete way to change the incentives, but I wasn't sure how the community would react.

It turned out to be one of the best-received announcements of the keynote. That response gave me confidence that people were ready to act on the reputation gap, not just recognize it.

You can learn how to earn Drupal advocacy credit and submit your advocacy work.

My ask is simple: talk louder about Drupal, especially to people outside our community. Drupal doesn't need hype, but we do need a better public record. We need more people showing, with real examples, what Drupal can do today.

I want to extend my gratitude to everyone who contributed to making my presentation and demos a success. A special thank you to Bálint Kléri, Christoph Breidert, Gábor Hojtsy, Lauri Timmanee, Matt Glaman, Michael Lander, Pamela Barone, Shibin Das, and the Drupal AI partners. Many others contributed indirectly to make this possible. If I've inadvertently omitted anyone, please reach out.

07 Oct 2026 7:50am GMT

Drupal AI can keep control of providers and model settings while Neuron handles agents and workflows. The new bridge also brings Neuron objects into Drupal's plugin system.

07 Oct 2026 7:11am GMT

One node, many translations: how Drupal's translation model works, why Drupal 7 migrations break it, and the configuration that has to be right afterwards.

07 Oct 2026 7:00am GMT

07 Oct 2026 6:58am GMT

DrupalCon brings love in every drop

Rachel Tue, 10/06/2026 - 21:19

• Read more about DrupalCon brings love in every drop
• Log in with GitHub or Google to post comments. Or, if you came across this post via Mastodon, just reply there!

06 Oct 2026 8:19pm GMT

Freedom with the form Attribute: More Flexible Drupal Views Exposed Filters

Joel Steidl Tue, 10/06/2026 - 13:19 Drupal

<form id="search-form">
  <input name="keywords">
  <button type="submit">Search</button>
</form>
 
<select name="sort" form="search-form">
  <option value="date">Date</option>
  <option value="title">Title</option>
</select>

{{ exposed|without('sort_by', 'items_per_page') }}
 
<div class="results-sort">
  {{ exposed.sort_by }}
</div>
 
{{ rows }}
 
<div class="results-footer">
  {{ pager }}
  {{ exposed.items_per_page }}
</div>

/**
 * Implements hook_form_views_exposed_form_alter().
 */
function example_form_views_exposed_form_alter(
  array &$form,
  FormStateInterface $form_state,
  string $form_id,
): void {
  foreach (['sort_by', 'items_per_page'] as $key) {
    if (isset($form[$key])) {
      $form[$key]['#attributes']['form'] = $form['#id'];
    }
  }
}

Joel Steidl

06 Oct 2026 7:19pm GMT

A first look at Gutenberg AI, the AI writing tools Ramsalt is building for Drupal

Sohail Lajevardi

Senior Drupal Engineer, Head of AI Engineering

06.10.2026

Most AI writing tools live in another browser tab. You copy text out, write a prompt, copy the answer back and fix the formatting. We wanted to get rid of that loop for people who write online. Gutenberg AI is the product we are building to fix that. It brings AI into the Gutenberg block editor, right next to the content it works on.

Video file

It is built on the Drupal AI framework, so it works with the chat provider you already use, whether that is OpenAI, Anthropic or a model running locally through Ollama. Everything it produces is standard Gutenberg blocks, so there is no lock-in.

A quick note before the tour: this is not a finished service yet. Gutenberg AI is under heavy development, features change from week to week and some of what you see here is still being tuned. We are sharing it now because we want to shape it together with the people who will use it. Here is a first look at what already works in our development builds.

In this post

• Better writing, right where you write
• An assistant that edits the page
• Use AI block or the sidebar assistant and build a section
• A proofreader that works while you type
• Editorial Desk
• Images and alt text
• Built for organizations that need control
• Help us shape it

Better writing, right where you write

Select a text block and the AI menu covers the everyday jobs: improve writing, summarize, expand, fix spelling and grammar, change the tone or translate. Highlight a single sentence and a small bar appears under it, so you can rewrite just that passage and keep or discard the result on the spot. Links and emphasis survive the round trip.

A few details we are especially happy with:

record_voice_over

Tones that fit your audience

It comes with tones like Formal, Friendly and Plain language, and admins can swap them for the readers your site actually writes for, such as prospective students or the press.

keyboard

Continue writing

Press Ctrl/Cmd+J and the next sentences appear as grey ghost text at your cursor. Tab accepts, Esc dismisses.

content_paste

Paste cleanup

Paste from Word or Google Docs and Gutenberg AI offers to rebuild it as real headings, paragraphs and lists, keeping every sentence.

bookmark_add

Your own actions

Found an instruction that works? Save it under your own name and reuse it from your AI menu.

translate

Translation that respects all languages

Real time one paragraph or all the page translation, with image alt text as well.

edit_note

Your edits win

Keep typing while the AI works and it will not overwrite you. The result is offered for review instead.

An assistant that edits the page, not just the chat

The AI Assistant sidebar is where Gutenberg AI goes beyond a single block. Ask it to "add a pricing section with three columns" or "remove the last paragraph" and it changes the page for you, using the blocks your site already has, including custom and third-party ones.

It can also do the heavy lifting on a blank page:

edit_document

Draft from a brief

Paste your notes, approve an outline and the page is written section by section. Stop whenever you like.

picture_as_pdf

Turn a PDF or Word file into a page

Drop in a document and get a structured page back, with the images from the PDF placed on the page.

view_quilt

Improve layout

Regroup existing content into sections, rows and columns using your theme's own colors and spacing, without touching the text or images.

travel_explore

Use your own site as a source

With the AI Agents module, ask it to "summarize our About page into this intro" and it looks up the real page and suggests internal links, limited to what you are allowed to see.

Every change is accountable. Applied changes are highlighted on the page, and each one has a before and after view and its own Revert button. Prefer to approve first? Turn on review mode and proposed edits show up as tracked changes, with added words in green and removed words in red, ready to accept or reject block by block.

Use AI block or the sidebar assistant and build a section

Sometimes you just need a chunk of content with a specific layout. Use the AI block within the editor or the right sidebar AI assistant, describe what you want and watch it stream in as standard Gutenberg blocks: columns, groups, buttons and tables. Maybe use some of your custom blocks too? One-click presets cover pricing tables, FAQs, calls to action and a lot more.

A proofreader that works while you type

Content clarity checks run live in the browser, with no AI call and no cost. Colored underlines flag long sentences, repeated words, your site's banned terms, vague link text like "click here" (Norwegian phrases included), images without alt text and skipped heading levels. Hedging words, complex words and passive voice are checked in both English and Norwegian, and adverbs in English. Most issues come with a one-click fix.

A live LIX readability score works well for Norwegian, and each content type can have its own target. The score turns red when a draft goes over it. When you want a deeper review, one click checks the whole draft against your own style guide and terminology and underlines the exact phrases that break a rule.

Editorial Desk: a second pair of eyes before you publish

For newsrooms and communication teams, the Editorial Desk adds a review layer powered by TypeSafe. It reviews the draft as you write and checks claims against your reference notes, marking each one as supported, contradicted or unverified. It also flags headlines that overpromise or miss the story, checks the text against up to five editorial policies and scores how well it serves different types of readers.

Any finding can be shown in the draft or handed to the assistant for a proposed fix. Full transparency is built in: you see which model ran each check, how confident it was and what it cost. The Editorial Desk requires a TypeSafe subscription.

Images and alt text

Generate an image straight from an empty Image block and keep writing while it works in the background. It is saved to the media library with the prompt as starting alt text. For existing images, a vision model writes the missing alt text, one image at a time or in bulk from a dedicated screen, and a Drush command handles large sites.

Built for organizations that need control

AI in a CMS has to answer to more than the editor, so we are building the controls in from the start:

shield_lock

Privacy limits

Decide the most the assistant may send: the full document, the structure only, the selection, or nothing at all. Editors can narrow it further, and an optional preview shows exactly what leaves the site.

monitoring

Budgets and usage

A dashboard shows requests, tokens, latency and cost by provider and model. Monthly budgets per role and per operation stop requests before they reach the provider.

palette

Your style everywhere

The site's style guide and terminology apply to every action, the assistant and every review.

verified_user

Safe output

Broken or unsafe AI output, including unsafe markup and links, is rejected before it touches the page.

tune

Fine-grained settings

Each action can be switched on or off and given its own model and prompt, with separate permissions for text actions, the assistant, images and the Editorial Desk.

Help us shape it: we are looking for testers

The best way to make Gutenberg AI good is to put it in front of real editors early. We are looking for a small group of organizations that want to test it on their own content and in their own workflows.

What you get

As a tester you get early access and a direct line to the people building it, and your feedback goes straight into what we build next.

What we ask

In return we ask for honest feedback on what works, what does not and what is missing.

It is a good fit if you run Drupal with the Gutenberg editor, or are open to trying it, and your editors publish regularly. Universities, the public sector and newsrooms are especially welcome.

Contact us at Ramsalt and mention "Gutenberg AI testing" in your message. Tell us a little about your site and your editors, and we will set up a meeting to walk you through it and see if it is a good match.

Let's talk

06 Oct 2026 5:36pm GMT

A buyer asks an AI assistant about your product, but the answer sits behind a click or an outdated page. A Drupal AI-readability audit checks whether intended services can reach your content, whether HTML delivers useful answers, and whether facts stay consistent across outputs.

Maciej Lukianski walks through five layers beyond classic SEO: access, delivered HTML, buyer questions, JSON-LD alignment, and multilingual consistency, plus what actionable findings should look like.

06 Oct 2026 3:48pm GMT

Choosing a CMS for catalogues, multilingual pages, and integrations means comparing how each platform handles relationships, editorial work, and delivery-not just content types on a slide.

Drupal vs Contentful, Sanity, and Storyblok take different paths: integrated application vs managed headless services, core translation and moderation vs SaaS localization, and visual editing vs configurable Drupal workflows. Maciej Lukianski walks through content models, permissions, JSON:API options, AI boundaries, and what growth costs look like on each stack.

06 Oct 2026 3:14pm GMT

Meet Dashi, the 'new' multilingual demo for Drupal CMS

Gábor Hojtsy Tue, 10/06/2026 - 17:17

06 Oct 2026 2:17pm GMT

Introduction

Adopting AI can feel overwhelming, so I am sharing a few tales from my experience creating, maintaining, and assisting with contributed Drupal modules. AI can do a decent job building a "greenfield" Drupal module from scratch, so my first tale is about using AI to build and contribute a module. For my next tale, I want to talk about using AI to maintain an existing "brownfield" Drupal module.

Growing up in NYC, I found brownfields often intimidating, with some so toxic that it can take years for backhoes and dump trucks to remove the contaminated topsoil before construction can begin. With code, a brownfield can contain technical debt, orphaned code, missing tests, etc. Simply put, a brownfield contains unknowns, which means more things can go wrong while working on it. Sometimes a brownfield is so big you need heavy machinery to maintain it, and that is exactly how I felt about using AI on the Schema.org Blueprints module.

Maintaining a large module using AI

Gradually, I have been experimenting with AI to help maintain the Schema.org Blueprints. At first, I would just throw a one-shot prompt at the AI to address a single issue, and it would do a decent job diagnosing and resolving the problem. As I became more confident steering the AI, I started asking it to create issue forks, commits, pushes, and even MRs. As I previously stated in my AGENTS.md I always have "Require me to review all changes before committing and pushing code." and most models respect this rule.

My comfort level reached a point where I am creating {module}-issue-maintenance agent skills that extend my drupalorg-issue-maintenance skills. These maintenance skills have agents to track remote issues in...Read More

06 Oct 2026 9:40am GMT

Drupal 12 and the End of Legacy Debt: A Forced Modernization for Enterprise Engineering bhavinhjoshi Tue, 10/06/2026 - 14:02

06 Oct 2026 8:32am GMT

The National Center for Family Philanthropy worked with DevCollaborative to reimagine their website, CRM, and other communications channels to effectively manage and scale their network of over 500 philanthropic families representing more than 3,000 individuals.

06 Oct 2026 6:53am GMT

The tools around Drupal have become simpler, complementing Drupal. Read our take on how Canvas, components, Drupal CMS, and AI are changing Drupal work.

06 Oct 2026 5:39am GMT

AI is becoming part of almost every software platform, and content management systems are no exception. Drupal is no different. But there is an important question that often gets lost in the excitement around AI: if Drupal already manages content so well, what exactly does AI add?

06 Oct 2026 2:41am GMT

TL;DR

macOS Docker provider performance has improved significantly over the years, and now all the providers seem to be performing about equivalently. So OrbStack, Docker Desktop, Lima, Colima, and Rancher Desktop are fast and working well.

Introduction

Back in November 2023 we published a hand-run comparison of macOS Docker providers. It was a snapshot: one laptop, one afternoon, one set of versions, and a Google Sheet. It answered the question people were asking, and then it started going stale the moment it was published.

That post is gone now, and this one replaces it, because the way we answer the question has changed. DDEV now runs the same benchmark battery every night, unattended, on every platform and Docker provider we support, and publishes the accumulated history.

Table of Contents

Where to see the numbers

The nightly results live at the DDEV performance history dashboard.

The easiest way to find it (and everything else the DDEV GitHub organization publishes) is to start at github.com/ddev/ddev.github.io and follow the "Performance History" link. That repo's README is the index of DDEV's GitHub Pages sites - bookmark it and you don't have to remember any of the other URLs.

The dashboard has two views. Trend over time plots one line per leg so you can see regressions and improvements as they land. Compare environments (latest) gives you a sorted bar chart of each environment's recent median, which is the view that most directly replaces the 2023 post's charts.

Which metric to compare

The harness collects six metrics per run. The one that lines up with the 2023 post is drupal_install_s: Puppeteer drives the Drupal web install wizard end-to-end, in a real browser, through the DDEV router, the web server, and PHP-FPM.

I think it's important that it uses a web-intensive install process for studying web server performance. The interactive installer deliberately breaks each batch step into its own HTTP request and page reload, so every one of those round trips exercises exactly the layer where Docker provider differences show up - bind mount vs. Mutagen, gRPC-FUSE vs. virtiofs, and so on. It's the closest thing in the suite to "what does it feel like to actually use this."

The companion metric drush_install_s runs the same install non-interactively via ddev drush si, which never touches the router or web server at all. If the two track together, filesystem I/O dominates; if they diverge, the gap isolates router/web server overhead. The perf/README.md describes all six metrics and why each one is there.

macOS results

Medians of the nightly runs from 2026-08-31 through 2026-09-30, drupal_install_s in seconds, fastest first. All legs are Apple Silicon (ARM64), all with Mutagen enabled except where noted.

The headline is how boring this table is. Five of the six Mutagen-enabled macOS providers land within 1.4 seconds of each other on the flagship metric, and their drush_install_s numbers are within 0.6 seconds. On macOS with Mutagen, your choice of Docker provider is mostly not a performance decision anymore. Pick based on licensing, maintenance, and how the tool fits your workflow.

That is a significant change from 2023, when OrbStack was clearly ahead and Colima and Rancher Desktop looked sluggish. Those gaps have largely closed (all are now using VZ/VirtioFS).

Compared with the 2023 numbers

The 2023 test did a Drupal 10 web install with Mutagen and got OrbStack 20s, Docker Desktop 22s, Rancher Desktop 22s, Colima QEMU 33s, and Colima VZ 35s. The fastest then (OrbStack, 20s) compares with 12.0s for the fastest now (Rancher Desktop), and with 13.4s for OrbStack. The slowest providers gained the most: Rancher Desktop went from 22s to 12.0s and Colima VZ from 35s to 12.6s. The spread between providers went from 15 seconds to about 1.4 (excluding Docker Desktop).

Treat these as a rough comparison, not a like-for-like benchmark. The 2023 numbers came from one MacBook Air M1 (2020) on a single afternoon, with DDEV v1.22.5, Drupal 10.1.6, and PHP 8.1. The nightly runs use CI runner machines, and newer DDEV, Drupal, and PHP versions. Both tests drive the demo_umami install through Puppeteer. Each Docker provider has also shipped many releases since 2023, and the Colima leg now uses VZ where one of the 2023 legs used QEMU with sshfs. Some of the improvement comes from the hardware, and some from the software.

When DDEV was young, a web install with Docker Desktop took SEVEN MINUTES. You'd just watch it poke along at each section. Now you don't even see those as they flash by. Now it takes 12-17 seconds. That's progress!

Mutagen is still doing the work

The most interesting row is the last one. OrbStack with Mutagen finishes the browser install in 13.4s; the same provider without Mutagen takes 16.8s - about 25% slower. Note that the no-Mutagen leg is faster on ddev_start_cold_s (9.2s vs. 12.2s), because there's no sync session to establish, and closer on drush_install_s (11.2s vs. 10.4s), because Drush never goes through the web server. The penalty concentrates in exactly the browser-driven path, which is what you use all day.

Mutagen is on by default on macOS for this reason, and these numbers say to leave it on.

However, plenty of people are perfectly happy with turning off Mutagen. Some folks don't like the additional complexity and don't want the speed trade-off. ddev config global --performance-mode=none turns it off. (Mutagen has more benefits than just performance though; with Mutagen, the web server in the container is dealing with a Linux filesystem, more like the real deployment environment, instead of a Docker bind-mount, which is more like a network filesystem.)

:::warning[Read the hardware caveat before comparing rows] The Docker Desktop leg runs on older M1 test runner machines that have dedicated hardware. OrbStack, Rancher Desktop, Colima, Lima, and Podman share a pool of newer machines. Some of the Docker Desktop gap in the table above is that hardware difference, not the provider. We didn't normalize it - the dashboard deliberately doesn't either - so treat Docker Desktop's row as "somewhat pessimistic" rather than as a clean like-for-like comparison. :::

The other platforms, and why you shouldn't rank them against macOS

The dashboard also carries Linux, WSL2, and traditional Windows legs. They're useful for spotting regressions within a leg over time, but the cross-platform bar chart is misleading if you read it as a platform ranking:

• The Linux leg runs on ephemeral GitHub-hosted runner VMs. It provisions the Drupal codebase from scratch every night and starts with cold image, Composer, and OS page caches. Every macOS and Windows leg reuses a persistent codebase and warm caches.
• The Windows and WSL2 legs run on entirely different physical hardware from the macOS test runners.

Trends within a leg: meaningful. Bar-chart comparisons across legs: only meaningful when the machines are comparable, which across platforms they aren't.

Getting the raw data

Every chart on the dashboard has a Download CSV button that exports exactly the rows behind whatever is currently displayed - after your leg and metric selections, not the whole dataset. That's the quickest path to your own analysis.

If you want everything, the underlying dataset is one JSON object per line at history.ndjson, with one line per (commit, leg) benchmark run:

curl -sL https://ddev.github.io/ddev/perf/history.ndjson |
  jq -r 'select(.os=="darwin") | [.timestamp, .docker_provider, .metrics.drupal_install_s] | @tsv'

Running it on your own machine

The harness that replaced the old ddev-puppeteer script lives in the DDEV repository and runs locally against a standard DDEV Drupal project:

./perf/run-benchmark.sh \
  --project-dir ~/workspace/d11 \
  --site-url https://d11.ddev.site/ \
  > result.json

It needs jq and Node.js on your PATH in addition to the usual DDEV prerequisites. If your numbers look very different from the nightly legs, we'd like to hear about it.

Summary

Three years ago the answer to "which Docker provider is fastest on macOS?" was worth a blog post with charts. Today the simple answer is that, with Mutagen on, they're close enough that the question is mostly settled, and any lingering differences are small next to the hardware you're running on.

What's better than a fresh answer is a standing one. The nightly harness means the next time performance shifts - a provider regression, a Mutagen improvement, a DDEV build-layer mistake - it shows up on the dashboard within a day, instead of waiting for somebody to run the numbers by hand and write another post.

Have questions, or numbers that look different from the dashboard? Join the conversation in our Discord, open an issue, or reach out via email.

Follow our blog, Bluesky, LinkedIn, Mastodon, and join us on Discord. Sign up for the monthly newsletter.

This article was edited and refined with assistance from Claude Code.

06 Oct 2026 12:00am GMT