Dokerize Laravel App with Nginx and Postgres. Chapter 1

I made this post as my personal 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 error, 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 new folder in our laravel app.

...rest of laravel dirs and files
|- infra
|--- app
|--- nginx
|------ conf
|--- pgsql
|------ script

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

PHP

We need these PHP dependencies to make our app run.

So, let's check the dependencies in our 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 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 PHP dependencies we needed also the composer, and then will expose our PHP app in port 9000.

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

Create docker compose

Then we back to 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.

You can read further more about network here.

...Continue...