Laravel with Docker (Section 6)

Creating laravel project without installing anything in host machine with the help of docker.

Application Containers

src: some folder, on our host machine, contains source code of this laravel php app.
php Interpreter (php service in our code) container: The src folder will be exposed to this. This will interpret the php code (src) code and generate response to the incoming request.
nginx: This web server will take all incoming request. And go to php Interpreter & let php interpreter generate response.And send back to the client.
sql: For storing DB. php Interpreter, in the end, needs to communicate with sql.
Application Conatiners need to be up always.

Utility Containers

Composer: Composer to php is like what is npm to node. This is a package manager which we can use to install third party packages. We'll use composer to create laravel application. And laravel will use composer to install third party dependencies.
Laravel Artisan: Laravel ships its own tool, Artisan along with php. This is for run migration against the DB and to write initial data to db.
npm: Laravel uses npm for some frontend logics.

Creating A Laravel Project

docker-compose run --rm composer create-project laravel/laravel .

. referes to the current folder. So files will be generated in current folder.
The above command will generate laravel code in src folder of our host machine.

Change the DB_HOST value as mysql in side the .env, found inside src folder as for inter-docker communication, if all the containers are under same network, we can replcae localhost by container_name (here service_name as we use docker-compose). And change the username, password and database name too as shown below. These values we can find under env/mysql.env.

Bringing up the laravel project

docker-compose up -d service1 service2 service3 etc

docker-compose up -d server php mysql

If we added depends_on property under the service server with php and mysql in docker-compose.yaml, the command to bring up the services is as follow:

docker-compose up -d --build server

--build is to rebuild everytime whenever we run the above command, or cached image only will be taken.

Other userful info.

Running containers

Built/pulled Images

Generated networks

Output

Point your browser to localhost:8000

Bringing down the docker services

docker-compose down

Checking the db connection and running migrations

Fixing error if happens

When using Docker on Linux, you might face permission errors when adding a bind mount. If you happens, try these steps:

Change the php.dockerfile so that it looks like that:

FROM php:8.3.1-fpm-alpine
 
WORKDIR /var/www/html
 
COPY src .
 
RUN docker-php-ext-install pdo pdo_mysql
 
RUN addgroup -g 1000 laravel && adduser -G laravel -g laravel -s /bin/sh -D laravel
 
USER laravel

Please note that the RUN chown instruction was removed here, instead we now create a user laravel which we use (with the USER instruction for commands executed inside of this image / container).
Also edit the composer.dockerfile to look like this:

FROM composer:2.6.6
 
RUN addgroup -g 1000 laravel && adduser -G laravel -g laravel -s /bin/sh -D laravel
 
USER laravel
 
WORKDIR /var/www/html
 
ENTRYPOINT [ "composer", "--ignore-platform-reqs" ]

Here, we add that same laravel user and use it for creating the project therefore.
These steps should ensure that all files which are created by the Composer container are assigned to a user named laravel which exists in all containers which have to work on the files.
Resolving permision issue

RUN chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www
RUN chmod 755 /var/www

actionanand/laravel_with_docker