ddev-claude-code

Claude Code

Claude Code is installed inside the DDEV container and is run with ddev claude.

Authenticating

The first time you run ddev claude, Claude Code walks you through its built-in guided login. This is the recommended way to authenticate and covers the common cases:

• Claude subscription (Pro/Max) — choose the subscription option and complete the browser login with your Claude.ai account.
• Anthropic Console (pay-as-you-go API billing) — choose the API option and complete the browser login with your console.anthropic.com account.

If the container can't open a browser for you, Claude Code prints a URL to open yourself and prompts for the code it gives you back.

Your credentials and configuration are stored under .ddev/claude-code/ (the .claude.json file and the .claude/ directory, which holds the login credentials in .claude/.credentials.json), and persist across restarts and rebuilds. You can also copy an existing .claude.json / .claude/ into .ddev/claude-code/ to reuse credentials, settings, or allowed tools from another machine.

API keys, cloud providers and self-hosted endpoints

For the cases the guided login doesn't cover — a raw API key, Amazon Bedrock, Google Vertex AI, or a self-hosted/proxy endpoint — set the relevant environment variables for the web container. DDEV reads them from a .ddev/.env.web file, so create one with the variables for your chosen method:

# Anthropic API key (instead of the guided login)
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=sk-ant-...

# Amazon Bedrock (AWS credentials must also be available in the container)
CLAUDE_CODE_USE_BEDROCK=1
AWS_REGION=us-east-1
AWS_PROFILE=my-profile

# Google Vertex AI (GCP credentials must also be available in the container)
CLAUDE_CODE_USE_VERTEX=1
ANTHROPIC_VERTEX_PROJECT_ID=my-project
CLOUD_ML_REGION=global

# Self-hosted / proxy endpoint (Anthropic API format)
ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL=https://gateway.example.com
ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN=...

These are secrets, so keep the file out of your repo by adding it to your project's top-level .gitignore:

echo '.ddev/.env.web' >> .gitignore

Then ddev restart to apply. When these variables are set, Claude Code uses them instead of the guided login.

Alternatively, set the variables globally so they apply to every project on your machine without any per-project file. This also keeps them out of the repo:

ddev config global --web-environment-add="ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=sk-ant-..."
ddev restart

Updating Claude Code

Claude Code is installed into the web container image, so it is pinned to whatever version was current when that image was built. It is not updated automatically.

This add-on provides ddev claude-update to manage updates. On every ddev start it also runs automatically (in report-only mode) and tells you when a newer version is available.

# Check whether an update is available and how to apply it.
ddev claude-update -n

# Update straight away, no prompts.
ddev claude-update -y

# Prompt to choose how to update (when run in a terminal).
ddev claude-update

There are two ways to apply an update, and they differ in how long they last:

• Instant (in the running container). ddev claude-update -y updates Claude Code inside the current container in a few seconds. This is fast, but the change lives only in the running container and is lost the next time the image is rebuilt (for example on ddev restart --no-cache or a DDEV upgrade).

• Permanent (rebuild the image). Rebuilding the web image re-runs the installer and bakes in the latest version, so it survives future rebuilds. On DDEV v1.25.0 or higher:

  ddev restart --no-cache

  This is slower (it rebuilds the image) but the update persists.

Updating automatically on start

To always pick up the latest Claude Code instantly whenever a project starts, set the DDEV_CLAUDE_CODE_AUTOUPDATE environment variable in your host shell (the update command runs on the host, so a DDEV web-environment variable won't be seen):

# Add to your ~/.bashrc, ~/.zshrc, etc.
export DDEV_CLAUDE_CODE_AUTOUPDATE=1

With this set, the post-start hook applies the instant update on every start instead of just reporting it. Remember this is the instant update, so for a version that persists across rebuilds you still want ddev restart --no-cache.

Drupal CLAUDE.md

For Drupal, we recommend using https://www.drupal.org/project/claude_code. You can install by running:

ddev composer config extra.drupal-scaffold.allowed-packages --json --merge '["drupal/claude_code"]'
ddev composer require --dev drupal/claude_code