Zeltro › A DDEV alternative that shares services across every project

Looking for a DDEV alternative

DDEV gives each project its own service stack. Zeltro gives every project on the machine one shared set — one Postgres, one MariaDB, one Redis — plus Python alongside PHP and Node, and an AI agent that knows where it is.

DDEV is a good tool. It is mature, it is well documented, and for a single Drupal or WordPress site it does exactly what it says. If it is working for you, there is no reason in this page to switch.

People usually go looking for an alternative for one of three reasons: the per-project service stacks add up, the project is not PHP, or an AI agent is now doing the building and the setup needs to be somewhere it cannot wander off.

One set of services, not one per project#

This is the structural difference. DDEV, Lando, Laragon and Herd all give each project its own database container. That is clean isolation, and it is also seven Postgres containers when you have seven projects.

Zeltro runs one zeltro-postgres, one zeltro-mariadb, one zeltro-redis, one zeltro-mongo and one zeltro-memcached, shared by every project on the machine.

The hostname part matters more than it sounds. http://my-api/ resolves the same way from your browser and from inside another project's container, so a Laravel app can query another project's database, or fetch from another project's API, with nothing configured.

Python, not just PHP and Node#

DDEV describes itself as a Docker-based local PHP and Node.js environment, and that is accurate — it is excellent at PHP. Herd is macOS and PHP. Laragon is Windows and PHP-centric.

Zeltro ships three base images — PHP 8.3, Python 3 and Node 22 — each with nginx, supervisor and every database driver already compiled in. Django, FastAPI and Flask sit alongside Laravel and WordPress rather than needing a different tool.

No per-project config file#

Lando has .lando.yml. DDEV has .ddev/config.yaml. Zeltro generates the compose file for you and adapts an existing one if the project already has it — bundled database services are rewired to the shared ones automatically, and the original is preserved as docker-compose.upstream.yaml so nothing is lost.

zeltro new laravel my-app        # scaffold a new project
zeltro setup existing-project    # adapt one you already have
zeltro clone work-directly https://github.com/someone/repo

Built for an agent to work inside#

This part has no equivalent in the older tools, because they predate the problem. Left alone in a directory, an AI coding agent will invent its own infrastructure — its own ports, its own bundled database, its own compose file — with no idea that twelve other projects exist on the machine.

Zeltro gives the agent a fixed environment: known runtimes, shared services, hostname routing, and an AGENTS.md in every project describing its URL, database and commands, so a fresh session picks the project up without rediscovering it.

Honest differences#

DDEV is more mature. More users, more documentation, more edge cases already found. Zeltro is young.

DDEV isolates better. Per-project stacks mean per-project versions. Shared services are a deliberate trade, not a free win.

DDEV has first-class CMS tooling. Drupal, TYPO3 and Magento workflows are a long-standing focus there.

Zeltro does not deploy either. Neither tool hosts anything; that is a separate job.

Questions

Checked 2026-08-22. Other products change often — if something here is out of date, tell us and it gets fixed.