In 2023 Ironstar produce a survey between Drupal developers, the survey includes developers from all around the world and asked about their tools and processes.

The survey includes 829 developers who responded with details (no one asked me  ) from 96 countries, the participants were responding even from countries like Ethiopia, Albania, Costa Rica, Vietnam, and Cuba ( no participant from Israel  )

The survey was also supported by a lot of people sharing it on social media, including the Drupal Association, Acquia, Platform.sh, Amazee, the developers of Lando and DDEV, and many, many more.

How many Drupal developers are in your current company?

Which tools are you using to provision and manage their local development environments?
As you might expect, Lando and DDEV featured heavily.
 

we saw that the users most likely to switch their local manager were using Lando, DDEV, or some kind of LAMP/WAMP stack.
On the surface, this might seem like Lando users are more likely to switch than DDEV users.
But when you look at the number of users, that’s about 7% of users thinking to switch who use Lando, versus 12% of users thinking to switch who use DDEV. So, it would appear that DDEV users are more likely to switch.

In per-capita terms, it’s mostly bad news for Docker4Drupal and Docksal, who had a total of 83 and 87 users respectively, so about one third of each of their users may be looking to switch.

Operating system usage is mostly as you might expect it to be, with nearly 56% of users on Macs, Linux with 29%, and Windows with 15%.

Drilling further down into individual operating system versions for Linux and Windows, we can see Debian-based Linux is overwhelmingly the most popular Linux distro family. Windows 10 still edges out Windows 11, nearly 2 years after Windows 11 was released.

Few respondents took the time to point out that they use Linux under the Windows Subsystem for Linux.

Which IDE/editor do you use?

PhpStorm is still the main IDE of choice, followed closely by VS Code.
There were only 3 VSCodium users out of 826 responses to this question.
VSCodium being the fully open source variant of VSCode.
It would have been nice to see that get more adoption.

More interestingly, is how this data has changed over time.
You can see here in blue/2019, red/2020, and yellow/2023.
PhpStorm and VSCode have both increased their market share, which, it seems, is mostly being achieved by eating up the market share of less popular editors, rather than taking market share from each other.

In other words, it appears that users new to VSCode didn't switch over from PhpStorm, and vice-versa.

which quality assurance controls were in place?

keeping mostly the same answers as were found in 2020’s survey, but also adding the option for custom responses.

It is a surprise that only 65% of respondents are doing some form of code review, but then I remembered that 17% of respondents are out there working alone as the only Drupal dev on their projects.

We can also see that the adoption of QA controls is improving, which is great.
When comparing some of the values in the 2020 survey, we can see a significant rise in the adoption of nearly all quality controls, but also a small increase for respondents expressing a total lack of control.

Hosting Providers

We asked respondents who they used to host their production websites and received a lot of answers.
Most respondents were using more than one host, so we collected a lot of varying data for this question.

The variation in answers posed a challenge in how to interpret and collate certain responses. For example, there were many responses for the different kinds of self-managed hosting.
On their own, these would have been too small to draw any significant conclusions from, so we aggregated some of these into “Unspecified Self-hosted”.

So, this category, which accounts for about 5% of all hosting, can be taken to mean anything from bare metal servers to self-managed Kubernetes.

When looking at the pure Drupal PaaS providers, we see Acquia, Pantheon, and Platform.sh on top with 18%, 16%, and 10% share each.
There are no clear winners in the hosting game, which we found very interesting.

Web Servers

Finally, a quick look at web server popularity. This is similar to the way IDEs broke down, with two vendors having nearly complete market share.

Most interestingly, is how Nginx has overtaken Apache as the main web server for Drupal sites.