/simple-easy-nginx-php

A Simple and easy NGINX/PHPFPM docker container setup that allows you to quickly start a simple PHP project. Which you can configure afterwards.

Primary LanguageDockerfile

simple-easy-nginx-php

This repository will easily allow you to quickly run a nginx/phpfpm with volume mounts from your local machine, allowing you to easily get started writing your first website, or even form the basis of a simple project you want to start

Getting Started

  1. Install docker onto your computer

    • Once installed, you'll be able to run any manner of servers side by side, multiple mysql databases, multiple websites
    • You'll start to learn the benefits of docker and how it's so much simpler than using XAMPP or variants
    • You'll learn the value of infrastructure as code. If you're a new developer. You'll be years ahead of your XAMPP loving colleagues

  2. Run composer install

    • This will install any dependencies you have, already I have setup the tests for you to start working on those
    • It will also copy the .env.dist to .env so your application has a starting set of environment variables that you can modify

  3. Edit the .env file which is created

    • The .env.dist file is a template with all the defaults, you shouldn't edit this
    • The composer install command will copy .env.dist to .env for you automatically
    • Change any values you think you need to in the .env file to match your system accordingly

  4. Run docker-compose build

    • This will build all the containers

  5. Run docker-compose up

  6. Open your browser to localhost:3000 to see the application running. Like in the screenshot here Running application

Benefits of this over XAMPP, WAMP, or similar

  • Docker allows you to build isolated conainers of software and all the instructions are written into source code files which can be uploaded to your git repository
  • This means, you don't just create your app, you also create HOW TO RUN you app, all inside the source code
  • Any changes to your website configuration are stored inside the source file, you commit these changes

***** BE CAREFUL OF STORING PASSWORDS *****

I cannot stress enough if you add passwords to these files and commit them, anybody who can read your git repository, can get your passwords

This is the reason why there is a seemingly useless .env.dist file which gets copied to .env.

Maybe you are thinking: Why do this? What is the purpose? Why not just create a .env file, right?

If you are thinking about these things, then realise that the .env.dist file does not contain any secrets and the gitignore is configured to not commit changes from your .env file. This means if you edit the .env file, you'll never accidentally upload these secrets to git.

So this seemingly useless .env.dist file, has a very important purpose.

** PLEASE DO NOT REMOVE .env from the .gitignore file **

Nginx

Nginx will serve the project to the browser and the /public folder is the application entry point. Edit the public/index.php file to load your php application. There is a sample inside the index.php file ready for you to edit.

PHP

PHP runs because Nginx passes php scripts to the phpfpm engine to be executed. It's the simplest docker setup that you can really start with which gives you all the power that you need. But there are some things to keep in mind

  1. Inside the docker container, your application root directory, is mounted into the /www directory
    • This means if you see paths like /www/App/Application.php then the /www part is your application directory on your computer
    • This can be tricky if you're not used to docker, but this is how containers work. You isolate programs into black boxes, similar to virtualbox or vagrant, but much more efficient
  2. File permissions can be tricky, symfony is very picky about file permissions
  3. You could easily install lumen or anything into this container and it should work without much extra effort.

Postgres database

I added a postgres database to the setup because I figured you might want an example which can let you work with a database. If you don't want this, you can just delete it from the docker-compose.yml file and remove the postgres environment variables from the .env file and it will be removed.

Change the settings of the environment variables in order to make the user, password, and database that you want.

It will be available for you on localhost if you try to connect from your php code