docker for mac docker-compose php mysql apache

Docker Docker-Compose Php Mysql Apache Code In Production
Docker Docker-Compose Php Mysql Apache Mac Or Docker

There are a lot of benefits to modernizing your application with Docker using docker-compose and some of the latest official images and features.

Today well take a look at several ways to containerize and link PHP, Apache, and MySQL together while demonstrating some tips, tricks, and best-practices that will help you take a modern approach when developing and deploying your PHP applications.

Please note that some Docker and security principals have been skipped here for simplicity and demonstration purposes.

Docker Docker-Compose Php Mysql Apache Code In Production

Namely PHP using root credentials, hardcodedweak MySQL password, lack of SSL, to name a few Do not run this code in production.

We will get into what docker-compose is, and what makes up this basic demonstration in the following sections.

It allows you to define the dependencies for those services, networks, volumes, etc as code.

Docker Docker-Compose Php Mysql Apache Mac Or Docker

As you roll into production, you can even specify deployment parameters on services which allow you to replicate, scale, update, and self-heal on Docker Swarm or even Kubernetes on the latest Docker for Mac or Docker Enterprise Edition.

Thus, it is a long-running best practice to run your primary service within a container as PID 1.

This means that no other process should be running inside of your containers.

It allows containers to maintain a native linux process lifecycle, respect linux process signals, allow for greater security, and will make your life easier when you schedule these containers on orchestrators such as Docker Swarm or Kubernetes in production.

We see our customers often starting to couple Apache and PHP together early on in a Docker journey by building custom images which include both Apache and PHP in the image.

This easily works in development scenarios and is a fast way to get off the ground, but as we want to follow a more modern approach of decoupling, we want to break these apart.

Were going to have Apache listen on port 80 and proxy connections which require PHP to port 9000 of our PHP container, and then have the PHP container serve those out as rendered HTML.

Sound complicated Dont worry This is very common in modern applications, Apache and NGINX are very good at this proxying, and there is plenty of documentation out there to support this behavior.

By specifying these networks in our services, we can leverage some really cool Docker features Namely, we can refer to the containersservices by their service names in code, so we dont have to worry about messy hard-coding of IP addresses anymore.

Phew Docker handles this for us by managing and updating etchosts files within containers seamlessly to allow for this cross-talk.

We can have our php and mysql services live in a network that is more restricted and not exposed to the outside world, and only expose our apache container on the required port.

Also notice that we call the php container in the code php which, because of the etchosts file integration that Docker handles for us, works flawlessly.

When we do this, we map a folder on the host filesystem (outside of the container context) to inside of the running containers.

Developers may wish to set their projects up like this because it allows them to edit the file outside of the container, yet have the container serve the updated PHP code out as soon as changes are saved.

Please see the official documentation on volumes for further use cases and best practices.

You could easily include composer in the PHP container to build and run your PHPLaravel application in a similar manner.

Perhaps you want to run Drupal or WordPress and decouple PHP from the Apache instance, that is possible too You can even use this to seamlessly test PHP version or MySQL version upgrades with minimal code change.

Docker For Mac Docker-Compose Php Mysql Apache