The European Accessibility Act (EAA) introduces new EU-wide rules to ensure digital products and services are accessible to everyone, including people with disabilities. By June 28, 2025, all businesses and organizations that offer digital…
Read moreHi there! What is the best way to improve Drupal development and encourage teamwork among development groups? This question is important for many developers, especially as remote teams and complex projects become more common. Setting up and maintaining traditional Drupal development environments can take a lot of time, often leading to problems and delays. In this article, your Drupal development company will look at how devcontainers can improve your Drupal cloud development process for the better.
Get CKEditor’s perspective on DrupalCon Atlanta 2025. From the Drupal Experience Builder to new plug-ins—here’s what’s shaping the future of Drupal.Doesn't exist.
I don't know if this was ever common knowledge, but it's certainly not a new idea. Free software, per the Free Software Foundation, is only free if people are free to redistribute it commercially without having to pay the author. In a sense, every time you build a Drupal site for someone else for a fee, you are charging to distribute free software to them that was authored by other people while providing additional services to tailor it to their needs.
If I had to guess, the more mainstream open source as a development methodology became, the more people adopted it without understanding or appreciating its philosophical origins. Open source as a growth strategy became inevitable while simultaneously kicking against the goads of the four essential freedoms of the movement that birthed it, even though these freedoms are what enabled multi-billion dollar ecosystems like Drupal's to grow.
Read moreExposing a Node.js App Over 80/443 on a Subdomain in DDEV
Have you ever needed to run a separate Node.js application alongside your main site in DDEV, and serve it securely
over ports 80 and 443 on a custom subdomain? While DDEV has built-in mechanisms for exposing additional ports,
sometimes you need more control, especially if you want to expos it through a domain like
frontend.example.ddev.site instead of a port-specific URL. This is where Traefik, bundled with DDEV,
becomes incredibly powerful.
In this post, we’ll walk through how to configure DDEV and Traefik to proxy requests from a subdomain directly to your Node.js app on port 3000 within the DDEV web container.
web_extra_exposed_ports?DDEV's' web_extra_exposed_ports feature is great for making your service accessible via a specific port
(e.g., (3000)). However, it doesn’t magically set up a subdomain for you to use on standard web ports (80/443).
If you want frontend.example.ddev.site to map to your Node.js app over HTTPS, you need a reverse proxy rule.
That’s where Traefik comes in.
.ddev/config.yamlIn your project’s .ddev/config.yaml, define the project name and the additional hostname you want to use. For example:
name: example
additional_hostnames:
- frontend.example
(Optional) You can still use web_extra_exposed_ports to expose the Node.js port if you want:
web_extra_exposed_ports:
- name: node-app
container_port: 3000
http_port: 3000
https_port: 3001
However, for a subdomain over standard web ports, the critical part is the next step with Traefik.
In your project's .ddev/traefik/config folder add a file named frontend.yaml. In frontend.yaml, you’ll define two routers—one for HTTP (port 80) and one for HTTPS (port 443)—and
a service that points to the Node.js app on port 3000.
http:
routers:
# Router for HTTP (port 80)
example-web-80-http-frontend:
entrypoints:
- http-80
rule: Host(`frontend.example.ddev.site`)
service: "example-web-3000"
ruleSyntax: v3
tls: false
priority: 100
# Router for HTTPS (port 443)
example-web-80-https-frontend:
entrypoints:
- http-443
rule: Host(`frontend.example.ddev.site`)
service: "example-web-3000"
ruleSyntax: v3
tls: true
priority: 100
services:
# The custom service that routes to your Node app
example-web-3000:
loadbalancer:
servers:
- url: http://ddev-example-web:3000
Here’s what’s happening:
frontend.example.ddev.site, it passes the request to the example-web-3000 service.http://ddev-example-web:3000 is the internal address of the web container running on port 3000.Run:
ddev restart
DDEV will pick up your new Traefik configuration, and you should now be able to access your Node.js application at:
ddev launch https://frontend.example.ddev.site
No more messing with non-standard port numbers in your URLs!
By leveraging Traefik's routing capabilities, you can expose any service running in the web container on standard HTTP/HTTPS ports and map it to a dedicated subdomain. This approach keeps your development environment clean, user-friendly, and closer to production-like URLs.
If you’ve followed these steps, your Node.js application will be served seamlessly over frontend.example.ddev.site.
Further Reading
Do You Have a Favorite DDEV Recipe? Contribute It!
We welcome community contributions to the DDEV blog and would love to have yours. The ddev.com repository has full details, and there's even a training session on how to do it. It's all just Markdown and we'll help!