Dockerize a PHP application

This repository is extending https://github.com/trafex/docker-php-nginx with minor changes to ease containerising a PHP application by using this image as base.

For full description of the original repository please visit https://github.com/trafex/docker-php-nginx directly. To provide a brief summary here:

• based on Alpine Linux distribution
• running unprivileged Nginx and PHP-FPM from supervisord

The respective changes include installing of pdo_mysql extentsion instead of MySQLi . And setting the default public directory differently to keep it closer to other images, such as composer.

Extending the server

The repository already contains a default server configuration that might be sufficient in most cases. When necessary it can be extended (rather than replaced completely) by providing one or more .conf.add files.

The default server only uses HTTP and listens on port 8080. This is done to ease the configuration, and HTTPS can be terminated before the requests are proxied to the service; for details see below.

Expected usage

The image defined in this repository is primarily expected to be used as base when defining other images.

FROM soch1/alpine-nginx-php
WORKDIR /app
COPY --chown=nginx <your_directory>/ /app

# append other configuration to the server if necessary
# for instance we can set expiration headers for cache, or to disable access
# logging on favicon.ico and robots.txt
COPY <your_configuration_file>.conf /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf.add

Usage with composer

With dependencies managed with Composer the build definition could be changed to use a multi-stage build.

Note that only the downloaded dependencies should be copied over and not the composer itself.

FROM composer AS composer

# copying the source directory and install the dependencies with composer
COPY <your_directory>/ /app
RUN composer install \
  --no-dev \
  --optimize-autoloader \
  --no-interaction \
  --no-progress

# continue stage build with the desired image and copy the source including the
# dependencies downloaded by composer
FROM soch1/alpine-nginx-php
COPY --chown=nginx --from=composer /app /app

# configure a directory with publicly available content
ENV NGINX_DEFAULT_ROOT www

# make logging and cache directories needed by the application,
# building using nginx user therefore ownership setup is unnecessary as the
# directories are created for current user
WORKDIR /app
RUN mkdir log temp

# append other configuration to the server if necessary
# for instance we can set expiration headers for cache, or to disable access
# logging on favicon.ico and robots.txt
COPY <your_configuration_file>.conf /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf.add

Configure Nginx public root

The public root in Nginx is set to /app/public_html by default. However this can be modified by providing a NGINX_DEFAULT_ROOT environment variable. The path is then appended to the default /app.

services:
  app:
    image: soch1/alpine-nginx-php
    environment:
      NGINX_DEFAULT_ROOT: your/public/dir
    volumes:
      - ./path/to/www:/app

The example above sets the public root to /app/your/public/dir.

Running with HTTPS

A docker image containing both the PHP application and the HTTP server can be then started as service using docker-compose.

version: '3'

services:
  app:
    image: image-that-you-built-above
    restart: unless-stopped

In cases When HTTP is sufficient the server can be then exposed directly by mapping the ports.

    ports:
      - 80:8080

Proxy the requests

With any advanced configuration needed, such as terminating HTTPS, a public HTTP server can be started to terminate HTTPS, and to proxy the filtered requests to the service.

location /api/ {
  proxy_pass http://<container_name>;
  proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
  proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
  proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
  proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
  proxy_read_timeout 900;
}

Availability

The image can be downloaded from Docker Hub.

Building locally

If necessary the respective image can be build locally, instead of downloading it from the Docker Hub.

docker build -t alpine-nginx-php .