“Stack” is shorthand for the software required to run Craft.

You may have heard acronyms like LAMP or JAM in conjunction with stack—these are just common combinations of technologies that developers and infrastructure engineers have standardized over time.

Craft is a dynamic web application (as opposed to static files), so it must have access to a few services to run:

• HTTP Server – Software that listens for incoming requests and can hand them off to another program to generate a response.
• PHP Interpreter – A program that compiles and executes PHP source code.
• Database – A storage medium not unlike a collection of spreadsheets that can be queried from code.

We recommend for new and returning Craft developers, because it offers the most consistent experience among the tools we’ve tried, and works across all major operating systems. DDEV uses containers to run each of the components above, meaning you don’t need to worry about configuring each of them independently—or whether your computer has (or is compatible with) a particular version.

Setting up DDEV happens in two main steps, each of which includes some platform-specific instructions:

1. Install a Docker provider (the underlying container management tool);
2. Install the DDEV binary (the program that talks to Docker);

That’s it! You now have everything you need to start building a Craft project—except Craft.

::: tip Before moving on, make sure you’re running DDEV 1.23.4 or later. You can check which version you’re currently running with the following command:

ddev -v
# -> ddev version v1.23.4

:::