Chapter 1: Dokerize Laravel App with Nginx and Postgres.

I made this post as my notes that might be useful for me or anyone who reads this.

By using docker containers you can ship your app to anyone or to any machine without worrying about versioning errors, incompatible dependency, etc.

So, in this post, I have a Laravel app with Postgres as the database. We are using multiple databases in this case.

To make it easy, we will dockerize our Laravel app, database Postgres, and web server Nginx.

Prerequisite

Before we get started, we need to add a new folder and a docker-compose file in our laravel app.

...rest of laravel dirs and files
|- docker-compose.yml [file]
|- infra
|--- app
|--- nginx
|------ conf
|--- pgsql
|------ script

Let's create an infra folder to store our docker configuration. Within infra, we have app to store laravel & PHP Dockerfile, nginx for web server, and pgsql for the database.

PHP

We need these PHP dependencies to make our app run.

So, let's check the dependencies in the docker image we are going to use.

docker run php:7.4-fpm php -m

We will see that some of the dependencies don't exist in the PHP image we are going to use. So let's create a custom image.

Create Dockerfile inside the app folder.
-> /infra/app/Dockerfile

FROM php:7.4-fpm

RUN apt-get update \
  && apt-get install -y \
  git \
  curl \
  libpng-dev \
  libonig-dev \
  libxml2-dev \
  zip \
  unzip \
  zlib1g-dev \
  libpq-dev \
  libzip-dev

RUN docker-php-ext-configure pgsql -with-pgsql=/usr/local/pgsql \
  && docker-php-ext-install pdo pdo_pgsql pgsql zip bcmath gd

COPY --from=composer:latest /usr/bin/composer /usr/bin/composer

EXPOSE 9000

Basically, this Dockerfile will install the PHP dependencies we need and also the composer, then it will expose our PHP app in port 9000.

You can customize the extension, if you need it you can install it, if you don't need it, you can remove it. You can see here for the list of commands to install the PHP extension.

Create docker-compose

Then we back to the root of the project and create docker-compose.yml there.

version: "3.7"

networks:
  app-network:
    driver: bridge

services: 
  app:
    container_name: app
    build:
      context: ./infra/app
      dockerfile: Dockerfile
    image: php-laravel-7.0
    restart: unless-stopped
    tty: true
    working_dir: /var/www
    volumes: 
      - ./:/var/www
    networks: 
      - app-network

Basically you can copy this configuration.

We can name our container in container_app and image name in image as we want.

./:/var/www in volumes means that, we copy our laravel app from laravel root ./ to our container working directory /var/www.

---

networks:
  app-network:
    driver: bridge

. . . 

   networks: 
      - app-network

The piece of code above means that the app or the container app (container_name: app) can communicate with other services within the same app-network network. In the example we will also add PGSQL to docker-compose, so to connect with pgsql, it will use app-network.

You can read further more about network here.

...continue...