Dockerized sytem for web development

A preconfigured docker environment with NGINX, HHVM, PHP7, PHP5.6 (both with imagick enabled php-md and other modules) and MySQL - More services to be added

Do not run docker compose using yml/docker-compose.yml because it wouldn't work. Use Blimp to configure it or remove not needed containers manually.

Services installation and configuration

As the architecture below explains, this system is based on microservices. Each microservice is indipendent.

This containerized infrastructure is designed to have multiple projects, each having its own services. To expose these projects, a new higher level network was added that will act as a load balancer and distribute the requests to the projects accordingly.

The steps to prepare a machine for docker are simple. You can install it anywhere be it a virtual machine in the cloud or a dedicated machine or your home computer.

You can use this official script and install it on most OSes

$ wget -qO- https://get.docker.com/ | sh

$ apt install docker.io
$ apt install docker-compose

All you need to install in your VM is wget.

Now, in order to be able to launch a project the Load Balancer and its network must be set up.

The network directory contains the docker-compose file needed to create these services. The ideal setup will have in this directory, all the services to automate project routing and https. Such as using docker gen and let's encrypt. But the important thing is the network called loadbalancer0.

Check out the feature branch traefik for a solution with traefik as a load balancer

And finally now you can set up your project. Open docker-compose.yml and docker-compose.dev.yml in the yml directory and configure it according to the project you're going to develop by removing or adding services. The templates.yml file contains snippets for other services.

Once done configuring the services, run the following command to create the environment.

$ docker-compose -f yml/docker-compose.yml -f yml/docker-compose.dev.yml up -d --build --remove-orphans

If you're familiar with docker you'll understand what the command above does. For those who are not, it loads the first docker-compose yml and then extends it with the second one, it brings up the services as a deamon so the command exits once the services are up and builds each service instead of using the pre-existing images. The remove orphans flag, removes any containers that have failed to launch previously.

Be careful that remove orphans can remove other projects' containers if --project-name is not specified before up

The yml files are highly customisable through .env files. Each service defined in yml/docker-compose.yml has is built through the corresponding image in images/. In the image directory of a service there is also it's .env file that contains all the configuration of that service. These environment variables are gonna be present inside the container as well during it's lifetime.

There's a global .env in the root directory of the repo which has some settings that will fill in docker-compose.yml

File structure

images: Contains directories representing each service needed, thus a Dockerfile
yml: As described above, contains the docker-compose configuration
network: Again a docker-compose configuraiton but not for the project, for the load balancer in case you're going to run multiple projects

Proposed Architecture

Files saved persistently

Upping the services with docker-compose.dev.yml will link volumes in your local machine. A data directory will be created and files that need to persist, such as your application or database, will be there. In production, these directories will be still persisten, but won't be linked in the host OS.

configuration files:

Before upping the services, go to the directory of each service you're using and change the configuration files. For example, for Nginx, you go to images/nginx. There you can get into conf and set it up the way you like as you would with any Nginx setup. These configuration files are copied inside the container automatically when it's built.