Through this guide we will try to outline an ideal flow to begin development with PHP/Laravel using Docker. Following this guide would also address some of the common issues that are faced by most developer when adopting such a flow. Without further ado, let's begin.
When working in an containerised environment, it becomes difficult to manage permissions effectively leading to some nasty errors. We would ideally want our filesystem configured in such a way that it would give us correct permissions to create/edit files on our favourite IDE and at the same time give us the flexiblity to use framework tools like Artisan, from inside the container and have everything behave correctly with one another. Fortunately, there is a simple solution. Following the script below will ensure that all permissions are set correctly and we are good to go.
The groups command reveals a list of groups the current user is a part of
groups $USER
Closely analyse the output of this command. Look for group name www-data in the listing. If www-data is present, your user is already a part of the www-data group and you can safely ignore the next command.
sudo usermod -aG www-data $USER
This command will add the current logged in user (you) into the www-data group. Close all open terminal instances and re-open a fresh new terminal for the changes to take effect. If things still do not work out, just reboot your machine :)
The first step will involve creating a new Laravel project for us to start developing with. In cases where you want to dockerize your existing application, you can skip this step.
docker container run -v $(pwd):/var/www/html --user $(id -u):www-data ajitemsahasrabuddhe/php-apache:bionic-7.3-dev composer create-project --prefer-dist laravel/laravel laravel-project
This command will take a while to finish, depending on your internet connection. Once this command finishes, you will have a fresh project created in a folder ```laravel-project`` in our working directory.
Moving on, we will now set correct permissions for our project directory where we would be keeping our code during the time of development. For me, this directory happens to be laravel-project. When following this guide, make sure to substitute this path with the path of your Projects directory.
sudo chown -hR www-data:www-data ./laravel-project
sudo find ./laravel-project -type f -exec chmod 664 {} \;
sudo find ./laravel-project -type d -exec chmod 775 {} \;
sudo find ./laravel-project -type d -exec chmod g+s {} \;
What the above commands will do is, change the group of the Projects directory to the www-data. Next, we give read, write permissions to the owner (you) and all members of it's group. As we are already a member of the www-data group, we will simply inherit the appropriate permissions. The last commands sets the group ID on the directory so that any subsequent files and folders created within this directory are automatically owned by the group.
Next, we will go ahead and start setting up the remaining part of our development environment like database and adding other configurations to the mix. If you already have a working codebase, you can continue this tutorial from here and replace the laravel-project folder with your own code folder.
Copy the other files from this gist i.e. docker-compose.yml, 000-default.conf, supervisor.conf, xdebug.ini into your project folder.
The docker-compose file will help us manage a default webserver container with php to run the application, a database instance to store data. In case of other software like redis, we can modify the docker-compose file to manage those containers as well.
The 000-default.conf provides default Apache configuration to enable Laravel to function.
The supervisor.conf is responsible for the core function of the container. It starts and manages the core processes like apache, cron etc. Additional processes like the queue:listen or horizon can be configured through here.
The xdebug.ini exposes the PHP debugger allowing us to debug the code line-by-line through popular IDEs like PHPStorm.
Once all the configuration is in place and modified as per need, you can use the command docker-compose up -d to start the application. docker-compose down will stop all the containers when your work is done.
Please note that use of this image is considered in an environment where PHP / Apache / Nginx etc are not installed and available locally. Please ensure that you run all the commands in the context of the application like composer or php artisan etc from INSIDE the container. Doing so from the outside using the PHP available on your system can lead to undesirable results.
Please update image name from ajitemsahasrabuddhe/php-apache:7.3-dev to ajitemsahasrabuddhe/php-apache:bionic-7.3-dev