DDEV Share Helper for WordPress

A DDEV add-on for WordPress that makes ddev share (cloudflared/ngrok tunnels) work out of the box.

What it does

Normally, sharing a local WordPress DDEV site over a tunnel breaks: WordPress generates every URL (assets, links, redirects, REST endpoints) using its configured local site URL, so visitors hitting the tunnel hostname get mixed-content errors, broken links, and redirect loops back to the unreachable local URL.

This add-on installs a single must-use plugin, ddev-share-helper-for-wp.php, that rewrites URLs on the fly for tunneled requests only:

• Local requests (Host = your *.ddev.site URL) are completely unaffected.
• Tunneled requests (Host = the tunnel hostname) get every generated URL, and the final HTML/JSON output, rewritten to the tunnel host — with no changes to the database.

A must-use plugin (or “mu-plugin”) is a plain PHP file placed in wp-content/mu-plugins/. WordPress loads every file in that directory automatically, before normal plugins — there is nothing to activate, and it never shows up as deactivatable in the admin plugin list. That makes it a good fit here: install the add-on and sharing just works. Removing the add-on deletes the file, which fully removes the plugin.

Requirements

• A DDEV project of type wordpress with a standard WordPress installation — one where the wp-content/ directory sits alongside wp-admin/ and wp-includes/, as in a default install. Composer-based setups that move wp-content somewhere else (such as Bedrock, which uses web/app/) are not currently supported.
• ddev share uses ngrok by default, which requires a free ngrok account and authtoken — see the DDEV sharing docs for setup and for alternatives like cloudflared.

Installation

ddev add-on get dustinatx/ddev-share-helper-for-wp
ddev restart

Then share your site as usual:

ddev share

Removal

ddev add-on remove share-helper-for-wp

Issues

If you run into problems, please file an issue.

Maintainer

@dustinatx