Customizing Defaults

Nitro is no longer supported. Please see our announcement and DDEV migration guide.

Nitro exposes a variety of ports and settings for you to customize using environment variables.

Looking to adjust resources?
Nitro uses whatever CPU, memory, and disk settings you’ve set for Docker. You can adjust these in Docker Desktop’s Resources panel and Nitro will automatically use them after Docker restarts.

# How to Customize Nitro’s Defaults

Let’s say you’re running another local development environment and the portcheck command confirms port 80 (HTTP) is already in use:

$ nitro portcheck 80
Port 80 is already in use...

Port 8080 seems like a fun, cool alternative so we’ll see if that’s available:

$ nitro portcheck 8080
Port 8080 is available!

Now we can use a shell environment variable setting Nitro’s HTTP port to 8080:

export NITRO_HTTP_PORT=8080

If the value contains whitespace, wrap it in quotes (").

Now run the init command:

nitro init

If you already ran nitro init and configured Nitro earlier, you can open Docker desktop, delete the relevant container—in this case nitro-proxy—and re-run nitro init. The container will be rebuilt and bind itself to our custom port.

Since we used export NITRO_HTTP_PORT, we only set the value for our current terminal session. To have it persist, we can add it to our default shell profile:

echo 'export NITRO_HTTP_PORT=8080' >> ~/.zshrc

# Nitro Environment Variables

The table below details every environment variable you can use to customize Nitro, what it’s used for, whatever its default value is, and which container—if any—you’ll need to reinitialize for your customization to take effect.

Environment Variable Used By Default Container
NITRO_HTTP_PORT HTTP URLs 80 nitro-proxy
NITRO_HTTPS_PORT HTTPS URLs 443 nitro-proxy
NITRO_API_PORT gRPC 5000 nitro-proxy
NITRO_DEFAULT_TLD TLD for auto-suggested site hostnames nitro n/a
NITRO_EDIT_HOSTS Attempt to edit hosts file when applying changes? true n/a
NITRO_MAILHOG_SMTP_PORT MailHog SMTP 1025 mailhog.service.nitro
NITRO_NODE_PORT Node.js port 3000 nitro-proxy
NITRO_ALT_NODE_PORT Alternate Node.js port 3001 nitro-proxy
NITRO_MAILHOG_HTTP_PORT MailHog web interface 8025 mailhog.service.nitro
NITRO_DYNAMODB_PORT DynamoDB server port 8000 dynamodb.service.nitro
NITRO_MINIO_PORT MinIO web interface and API 9000 minio.service.nitro
NITRO_REDIS_PORT Redis server port 6379 redis.service.nitro