Using Browsersync via a Gulp Task with DDEV-local

Question

I am using DDEV as my local hosting environment, and many of my projects implement front end automation via Gulp. Browsersync is a major component to our front end set-up, and requires ports to be exposed by the DDEV container to the host machine. The problem at hand is two fold, what is the best way to expose a port to the host machine from the container, and what is the best set-up for a Browser-Sync Gulp task in a DDEV environment?

Answer 1

Edit 2024-08-20: Most people use the excellent ddev-browsersync add-on these days to work with Browsersync, and skip all of the below.

They also normally use the web_extra_exposed_ports feature of DDEV instead of fiddling with HTTPS_EXPOSE.

(Original answer follows)

Exposing the Necessary Ports

Part one of this situation requires using a Docker Compose file to expose your container's port to the hose machine. Based on this Answer you need to create a docker-compose.browsersync.yaml file in your .ddev directory.

An example of that file for Browser-Sync would be as follows:

# Override the web container's standard HTTP_EXPOSE and HTTPS_EXPOSE
# This is to expose the browsersync port.
services:
  web:
    # ports are a list of exposed *container* ports
    expose:
      - '3000'
    environment:
      - HTTP_EXPOSE=${DDEV_ROUTER_HTTP_PORT}:80,${DDEV_MAILHOG_PORT}:8025,3001:3000
      - HTTPS_EXPOSE=${DDEV_ROUTER_HTTPS_PORT}:80,${DDEV_MAILHOG_HTTPS_PORT}:8025,3000:3000

We expose Port 3000 here because it is the default for Browser-Sync, but could be updated to reflect the needs of your projects.

Note: After adding this file to your .ddev directory you should restart your ddev project.

For more information on defining new services with docker compose, read the DDEV docs.

Setting-Up Browser-Sync in Gulp

This assumes you have a working gulpfile.js ready to do with your other required packages included already. If you're not fully familiar with Browser-Sync and Gulp, please refer to their docs for full details.

const browserSync = require('browser-sync').create();

/*
* Set 'url' (the host and proxy hostnames) to match the canonical url of your ddev project.
* Do not include the http/s protocol in the url. The ddev-router will route the
* host machine's request to the appropriate protocol.
* 
* ex: yoursite.ddev.site
*/
const url = 'yoursite.ddev.site';

/*
* This function only includes the most basic browser-sync settings needed
* to get a watch server running. Please refer to the browser-sync docs for other
* available options.
*/
const startServer = function (done) {
    // Initialize BrowserSync
    browserSync.init({
        proxy: url,
        host: url,
        port: 3000,
    });
    done();
};

exports.startServer = startServer;

You can test this using gulp startServer after initial set-up. Gulp will output a http as the External URL for testing. However thanks to the ddev-router it can be accessed via http or https.