Denis

I’m a passionate software engineer. Welcome to my blog!

By Denis Nuțiu

1 minute read

Hello 👋,

In this month’s blog post I’ll show you how to run a PHP Application inside a container.

I’m quite a fan of online forums and the majority of forum software is written in PHP. To evaluate them quickly I wanted the ability to be able to run and install then locally.

I’ve come up with this docker-compose file

services:  nginx:    build:      context: ./      dockerfile: nginx.dockerfile    ports:      - "8080:80" # change port 10080 to any other port    volumes:      - ./config/nginx/conf.d:/etc/nginx/conf.d:z      - ./.data/nginx:/var/log/nginx:z      - application:/var/www/html:z      - composer:/root/.composer:z  php:    build:      context: ./      dockerfile: php83.dockerfile    volumes:      - ./config/php.ini:/usr/local/etc/php/php.ini:z      - application:/var/www/html:z      - composer:/root/.composer:z  database:    image: "postgres:latest"    ports:      - 15432:5432    environment:      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: denis      POSTGRES_USER: batman    volumes:      - ./.data/postgres/:/var/lib/postgresql/data/:z  maria:    image: mariadb    restart: always    ports:      - 13306:3306    environment:      MARIADB_ROOT_PASSWORD: example    volumes:      - ./.data/maria/:/var/lib/mysql:zvolumes:    composer:    application:      driver: local      driver_opts:        type: none        device: ./application        o: bind

All you need to do is place the PHP application inside the ./application directory and run:

podman compose up # or docker compose up

The file will set up the following components:

  • php - The PHP runtime.
  • nginx - The Nginx web server used to serve requests. You can customize it by editing ./config/nginx/conf.d/default.conf
  • database - Runs a PostgresSQL database which persists data inside the local ./.data directory.
  • maria - Runs a MariaDB database which persists data inside the local ./.data directory.

It’s unlikely that you need both databases running at the same time, feel free to delete the one you don’t need. Some PHP Applications work with PostgresSQL and some work only with MariaDB/MySQL.

Thank you for reading, if you have any questions please do reach out on @mastodon.

By the way, I’m using this method to host my forum.

The full code is available on forge: https://gitlab.nuculabs.dev/dnutiu/containerized-php-application