Setting up Laravel with Docker - Part 1

Laravel is by far one of the most popular PHP framework. In this post we will set up laravel application using Docker.

Laravel is one of the most popular PHP framework available right now. In this post we will set up laravel application using Docker. Docker enables independence between software application and the infrastructure by enabling containerization of the platform.

Docker is available on most of the operating systems. Download and install the appropriate version of docker for your operating system from Docker Store. Verify the installation by going into the terminal and by typing docker -v. This should give you the version of docker installed in your computer.

Docker version 17.09.0-ce, build afdb6d4

Our project structure will look as follows. Application will live inside app folder and docker related files will live inside docker folder.

+-- laravel
|   +-- app
|   +-- docker
|   |   +-- Dockerfile
|   |   +-- supervisord.conf
|   |   +-- default

Create the directory structure by typing following command in the terminal.

cd ~
mkdir -p laravel/app laravel/docker
touch laravel/docker/Dockerfile

Building docker container

Dockerfile defines all the commands that will run in the container to assemble the container image. Add the following code in Dockerfile.

FROM php:7.0-fpm

LABEL maintainer="Subash Adhikari <me@subash.com.au>"

RUN apt-get update \
    && apt-get install -y nginx curl zip unzip git supervisor sqlite3 \
    && php -r "readfile('http://getcomposer.org/installer');" | \
      php -- --install-dir=/usr/bin/ --filename=composer \
    && echo "daemon off;" >> /etc/nginx/nginx.conf \
    && ln -sf /dev/stdout /var/log/nginx/access.log \
    && ln -sf /dev/stderr /var/log/nginx/error.log \
    && apt-get -y autoremove && apt-get clean \
    && rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/* /tmp/* /var/tmp/* /var/www/html/*

COPY default /etc/nginx/sites-available/default
COPY supervisord.conf /etc/supervisor/conf.d/supervisord.conf

EXPOSE 80

CMD ["/usr/bin/supervisord"]

Don’t be overwhelmed by what’s happening here. We will break down Dockerfile step by step. At the end of this section, you will have clear understanding of each line of code.

We are using php-fpm7 docker image as our base image for the container.

FROM php:7.0-fpm

Here we are adding meta-data to the image which specifies the maintainer of the image. Replace it with your own details.

LABEL maintainer="Subash Adhikari <[email protected]>"

Docker caches each docker command when the image is being built. Docker will not run the command again if it is unchanged in the next run. Commands that are not likely to change often should be grouped together so the subsequent builds are faster.

RUN command runs the specified commands in the container while building it. Lets breakdown the RUN command.

We begin by updating the apt repositories and then install dependencies required by Laravel application.

apt-get update \
&& apt-get install -y nginx curl zip unzip git supervisor sqlite3 \

Next, we install composer. It is required to install Laravel and manage its PHP dependencies.

&& php -r "readfile('http://getcomposer.org/installer');" | \
php -- --install-dir=/usr/bin/ --filename=composer \

Nginx by default runs as a daemon in the background. We disable it so we can run it using supervisord.

&& echo "daemon off;" >> /etc/nginx/nginx.conf \

We create symlink of nginx access and error logs to stdout and stderror to access it from docker.

&& ln -sf /dev/stdout /var/log/nginx/access.log \
&& ln -sf /dev/stderr /var/log/nginx/error.log \

Finally we cleanup the stuff that we don’t need. This is important to keep the size of image small.

&& apt-get -y autoremove && apt-get clean \
&& rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/* /tmp/* /var/tmp/* /var/www/html/*

COPY command copies the local file into the container to specified path. We are copying template for nginx and supervisord configuration into the container.

COPY default /etc/nginx/sites-available/default
COPY supervisord.conf /etc/supervisor/conf.d/supervisord.conf

We then instruct docker that the container should listen on port 80 during the runtime.

EXPOSE 80

Finally we specify the default command to run when the container starts.

CMD ["/usr/bin/supervisord"]

Following is the configuration for nginx and supervisord.

Create a file called ~/docker/laravel/default and add the following nginx configuration in it.

Nginx config

server {
  root /var/www/html/public;

  index index.html index.htm index.php;

  server_name _;
  charset utf-8;

  location = /favicon.ico { log_not_found off; access_log off; }
  location = /robots.txt { log_not_found off; access_log off; }

  location / {
    try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php$is_args$args;
  }

  location ~ \.php$ {
    include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
    fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
  }

  error_page 404 /index.php;

  location ~ /\.ht {
    deny all;
  }
}

supervisord config

Create another file called ~/laravel/docker/supervisord.conf and add the following configuration in it.

[supervisord]
nodaemon=true

[program:nginx]
command=nginx
stdout_logfile=/dev/stdout
stdout_logfile_maxbytes=0
stderr_logfile=/dev/stderr
stderr_logfile_maxbytes=0

[program:php-fpm]
command=php-fpm
stdout_logfile=/dev/stdout
stdout_logfile_maxbytes=0
stderr_logfile=/dev/stderr
stderr_logfile_maxbytes=0

Building the image

Now that our Dockerfile is ready, lets build the image. We use docker build command to build the image from Dockerfile.

docker build -t subashcom/laravel ~/laravel/docker

We then tag the image by using -t flag. subashcom is the name-space of the image and laravel is the name. You can change it to whatever you want. The last parameter is path to directory that contains Dockerfile.

We can verify the image is build correctly by listing all images using docker images command.

Installing laravel

As our laravel docker container is ready now, next we will install laravel by running the following command.

docker run -it --rm \
    -w /var/www \
    -v ~/laravel/app:/var/www/html \
    subashcom/laravel \
    composer create-project --prefer-dist laravel/laravel html

-it flag interactively runs the container. --rm command removes the container once the command finishes executing. -w is the working directory for the command that is being ran. We mount the app directory to /var/www/html directory inside the container. subashcom/laravel specifies the image we want to run. The command after the image name is the command we want to run inside the container in the specified working directory. Finally the command that follows image name installs laravel application in html directory inside the container.

Running the application

At this point we have installed Laravel application inside our docker container. Next we will run the application and access it via web browser. Notice that we are not passing any command after the image name. This will run the default command that we specified in the docker file.

We are sharing port 80 and 9000 of container with the host machine. Nginx serves application at port 80 and 9000 is used by php-fpm. -d flag runs the docker container in detached mode in the background so it does not block the terminal window.

docker run -d --rm \
    --name=laravel
    -p 80:80 -p 9000:9000
    -w /var/www \
    -v ~/laravel/app:/var/www/html \
    subashcom/laravel

Now the site can be accessed by browsing to localhost or 127.0.0.1 in the web browser. The running container can be stopped by typing docker stop laravel.

Conclusion

We have installed the Laravel application in a dockerized container which can be easily shipped around. The docker commands that we used were quite large and complex. This can be simplified by using docker-compose. In part 2 of this series we will use docker-compose to build the container and update the application to use redis and mysql.

Related Posts

Setting up laravel with docker: Part 2

Setting up laravel with docker: Part 3