Benefits:

• You don’t ever need to install php and any other tool locally on your host system, you only need the VS Code app (or even Free/Libre Open Source VS Codium app).
• You have a native app experience with local graphical interface, but all operations are performed inside the container.
• You use for development the same versions of php, composer, phpcs and other tools as installed in the container without any additional actions.
• You can use totally different environments per each project (different composer versions, php versions, other tools) without any tricks on your local system.
• You always have the native terminal console from the container, without needing to launch ddev composer install and ddev ssh proxy commands.
• You can even connect to any remote computer using ssh and attach VS Code to it’s containers from your local machine with the same working performance like working with local project.

Installation:

1. Install VS Code from https://code.visualstudio.com/download
2. Launch VS Code and install Visual Studio Code Remote Development Extension Pack https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-vscode-remote.vscode-remote-extensionpack
3. Click on the “Remote Explorer” icon on left panel, choose “Containers” from the top dropdown.
4. See the list of active Docker containers, right click on ddev-projectname-web container, choose “Attach to Container”.
5. Wait while VS Code will download and deploy the server-side component of VS Code into the container (”Downloading VS Code Server” message), and that’s all!

Additional configuration:

• To fix the XDebug connection to VS Code inside the container you need to redirect xdebug target to localhost via creating a php configuration file .ddev/php/xdebug-localhost.ini:

  xdebug.client_host=127.0.0.1
  

• To use VS Code as default editor: