This past weekend I was playing around on some pet projects and wanted to get up and running quickly. My initial reaction was to reach for a Vagrant box provisioned with Ansible. After all, that’s what I’ve been using for a really long time now.

Recently I’ve been also learning a bit more about Docker, so I figured maybe this pet project would be a good project to replace the standard Vagrant set up and go with Docker instead. When it comes to Docker, by now I believe I have a fairly good understanding of how it works and how it’s meant to be used in a development environment. I’ve learned a lot about it from Vranac, as well as poked around it on my own.

While trying to write a set of Docker files and Docker compose files for this project, I thought there must be an easier way to do this… And then I remembered that some time ago I came across a generator to generate Docker environments for PHP projects: PHPDocker.io. As they state on their website:

PHPDocker.io is a tool that will help you build a typical PHP development environment based on Docker with just a few clicks. It supports provisioning of the usual services (MySQL/MariaDB, Redis, Elasticsearch...), with more to come. PHP 7.1 is supported, as well as 7.0 and 5.6.

Click-click-click… done.

What I like about PHPDocker is that it takes a couple of clicks and filling out a couple of text fields to get a nice zip with all the things needed to get a project up and running. It has support for a “generic” PHP application, like Symfony 4, Zend Framework and Expressive, or Laravel, as well as for applications based on Symfony 23, or Silex. PHP versions supported range from 5.6 to 7.2 and a variety of extensions can be additionally enabled. Support for either MySQL, MariaDB, or Postgres is provided, as well as a couple of “zero-config” services like Redis or Mailhog.

The zip file comes with a phpdocker directory that holds the configurations for the specific containers such as the nginx.conf file for the nginx container. In the “root” of the zip there’s a single docker-compose.yml file which configures all the services we told PHPDocker we need:

docker-compose.yml

###############################################################################
#                          Generated on phpdocker.io                          #
###############################################################################
version: "3.1"
services:
mysql:
  image: mysql:<span style="color:#ae81ff">5.7</span>
  container_name: test-mysql
  working_dir: /application
  volumes:
    - .:/application
  environment:
    - MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=root
    - MYSQL_DATABASE=test
    - MYSQL_USER=test
    - MYSQL_PASSWORD=test
  ports:
    - <span style="color:#e6db74">&#34;8082:3306&#34;</span>

webserver:
  image: nginx:alpine
  container_name: test-webserver
  working_dir: /application
  volumes:
      - .:/application
      - ./phpdocker/nginx/nginx.conf:/etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf
  ports:
   - <span style="color:#e6db74">&#34;8080:80&#34;</span>

php-fpm:
  build: phpdocker/php-fpm
  container_name: test-php-fpm
  working_dir: /application
  volumes:
    - .:/application
    - ./phpdocker/php-fpm/php-ini-overrides.ini:/etc/php/<span style="color:#ae81ff">7.2</span>/fpm/conf.d/<span style="color:#ae81ff">99</span>-overrides.ini</code></pre></div>

Run docker-compose up in the directory where the docker-compose.yml file is located and it’ll pull and build the required images and containers, and start the services. The application will be accessible from the “host” machine at localhost:8080, as that’s the port I defined I wanted exposed in this case. You can see that in the ports section of the webserver service.

One thing I noticed is that the mysql service doesn’t keep the data around, but that can be fixed by adding a new line to the volumes section of that service: ./data/mysql:/var/lib/mysql. The mysql service definition should now read:

    mysql:
      image: mysql:5.7
      container_name: test-mysql
      working_dir: /application
      volumes:
        - .:/application
        - ./data/mysql:/var/lib/mysql
      environment:
        - MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=root
        - MYSQL_DATABASE=test
        - MYSQL_USER=test
        - MYSQL_PASSWORD=test
      ports:
        - "8082:3306"

Other than this, I didn’t notice any issues (so far) with the environment.

Inside the phpdocker folder there’s also a README file that provides additional information how to use the generated Docker environment, what services are available on what port, a small “cheatsheet” for Docker compose, as well as some recommendations how to interact with the containers.

Happy hackin’!