The goal is to have an easy to use environment for developing web projects with PHP. We don't want to fiddle with configuration files each time we start a new project or try a different version of our project. Instead we want to create a new directory, deploy our files and fire up the browser to get going.
The following environment provides Debian GNU/Linux 12 (Bookworm) with PHP 8.1, Composer 2.x, Nginx 1.22, MariaDB 10.11, Memcached and Redis.