Create a Docker for Laravel applications with Nginx and MySQL

Docker is a hot topic for software developers and it is in trend. It is an amazing tool for moving application and for setting up new environment. So in this article i will let you know about to create docker setup for Laravel application with Nginx and MySQL and Docker compose on Ubuntu 18.04 in easy steps.

Before start anything you should have ubuntu 18.04 machine with root privileges because you will need to execute multiple commands in this process.

Now we can start with the following steps:

Step 1: Install Docker and Docker Compose

First thing in the process of docker setup for an application we will have docker and docker compose installed on the machine in which we are working.

Update repository on your ubuntu machine with the command below:

sudo apt update

After updating the repository we will need to install docker and docker compose . Execute these two command for doing same

sudo apt install docker.io -y
sudo apt install docker-compose -y

After successfully executing above commands you will have installed docker and docker compose on your ubuntu machine. You can check if it is installed on your machine or not with the following commands

docker version
docker-compose version

After executing docker version command you will see docker client and server details with version.

Next, we will need to assign a non-root user to the docker group in order to run the Docker container for non-root users.

For the demo purpose i am taking user “testuser” you can choose your own. and execute this command

usermod -a -G docker testuser

And after that, log in to the ‘testuser’ user shell and run the docker ‘hello-world’ command like below

su - testuser
docker run hello-world

After running docker hello world, you will get hello world message from docker

Now your docker installation step has completed and docker has installed successfully in your ubuntu machine.

Step 2 – Download and Install Laravel with Dependencies

In this step first thing you will need to login into your system as a non root user then we will download laravel by cloning laravel from git repository.

Download laravel into myapp directory using the command below

git clone https://github.com/laravel/laravel.git myapp/
cd myapp/

After that run the following command to install Laravel dependencies

docker run --rm -v $(pwd):/app composer install

By executing the above command we have created a temporary docker container and mount the ‘myapp’ project directory to the ‘/app’ directory on the container. This container is based on composer docker image and here we are installing composer dependencies to the temporary container.

Now after successfully installation of dependencies we will need to change the owner of the myapp directory to our own user using the sudo command as mentioned below

sudo chown -R $USER:$USER ~/myapp

Step 3 – Dockerize the Laravel Application

In the above steps we have installed docker in our ubuntu machine, download and installed laravel and its dependencies successfully, now in this third step we will dockerize to our laravel application.

So here we will create docker compose file and a docker file to our application’s root directory

cd myapp/
vim docker-compose.yml

Here i have used vim editor to edit docker-compose.yml file. You can choose your own editor which suits to you.

Now we will add some code to define laravel application, nginx, mysql into docker compose file as three different services. And the final code of docker-compose.yml file will be look a like below.

version: '3'
services:

  #Laravel App
  app:
    build:
      context: .
      dockerfile: Dockerfile
    image: hakase-labs/laravel
    container_name: app
    restart: unless-stopped
    tty: true
    environment:
      SERVICE_NAME: app
      SERVICE_TAGS: dev
    working_dir: /var/www/html
    volumes:
      - ./:/var/www/html
    networks:
      - mynet

  #Nginx Service
  nginx:
    image: nginx:alpine
    container_name: nginx
    restart: unless-stopped
    tty: true
    ports:
      - "80:80"
      - "443:443"
    volumes:
      - ./:/var/www/html
      - ./nginx/conf.d/:/etc/nginx/conf.d/
      - ./nginx/ssl/:/etc/nginx/ssl/
    networks:
      - mynet

  #MySQL Service
  db:
    image: mysql:5.7
    container_name: db
    restart: unless-stopped
    tty: true
    ports:
      - "3306:3306"
    environment:
      MYSQL_DATABASE: laraveldb
      MYSQL_USER: laraveluser
      MYSQL_PASSWORD: laravel_db_password
      MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: mysql_root_password
    volumes:
      - mysqldata:/var/lib/mysql/
    networks:
      - mynet

#Docker Networks
networks:
  mynet:
    driver: bridge
#Volumes
volumes:
  mysqldata:
    driver: local

Virtual Host for Laravel application –

Now we will create nginx virtual host for our application. So let’s create nginx directory in myapp directory and two other directory under this nginx directory by running the following command.

mkdir -p nginx/{conf.d,ssl}

Now we will create laravel.conf file under conf.d directory and put following code into this file.

nginx/conf.d/laravel.conf

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name domain_name;
    # Redirect all request to https
    return 301 https://domain_url;
}

server {
    listen 443 ssl http2;
    server_name domain_name;

    //SSL Certificate file 
    ssl_certificate /etc/nginx/ssl/fullchain.pem;
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/nginx/ssl/privetkey.pem;

    # Log files for Debug
    error_log  /var/log/nginx/error.log;
    access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log;

    # Laravel application's root directory
    root /var/www/html/public;
    index index.php index.html;

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
        gzip_static on;
    }

    # Nginx Pass requests to PHP-FPM
    location ~ \.php$ {
        try_files $uri =404;
        fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
        fastcgi_pass app:9000;
        fastcgi_index index.php;
        include fastcgi_params;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $fastcgi_path_info;
    }
};

Now copy the ssl files as mentioned above into nginx/ssl directory using this command

sudo cp /path/to/ssl/fullchain.pem nginx/ssl/
sudo cp /path/to/ssl/privkey.pem nginx/ssl/

Create Dockerfile

Now we will create Dockerfile to the laravel application’s root directory. And add following line of code into this file.

# Set master image for php
FROM php:7.2-fpm-alpine

# Copy composer.lock and composer.json
COPY composer.lock composer.json /var/www/html/

# Set working directory
WORKDIR /var/www/html

# Install Additional dependencies
RUN apk update && apk add --no-cache \
    build-base shadow vim curl \
    php7 \
    php7-fpm \
    php7-common \
    php7-pdo \
    php7-pdo_mysql \
    php7-mysqli \
    php7-mcrypt \
    php7-mbstring \
    php7-xml \
    php7-openssl \
    php7-json \
    php7-phar \
    php7-zip \
    php7-gd \
    php7-dom \
    php7-session \
    php7-zlib

# Add and Enable PHP-PDO Extenstions
RUN docker-php-ext-install pdo pdo_mysql
RUN docker-php-ext-enable pdo_mysql

# Install PHP Composer
RUN curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php -- --install-dir=/usr/local/bin --filename=composer

# Remove Cache
RUN rm -rf /var/cache/apk/*

# Add UID '1000' to www-data
RUN usermod -u 1000 www-data

# Copy existing application directory permissions
COPY --chown=www-data:www-data . /var/www/html

# Change current user to www
USER www-data

# Expose port 9000 and start php-fpm server
EXPOSE 9000
CMD ["php-fpm"]

Now we have completed application dockerizing step. And ready to create build.

Step 4: Create build with nginx, mysql and laravel services

Now we will create docker image build for our laravel application using the following docker compose command.

docker-compose build

After creating successful build, we will need to download all the docker images and run container services defined in cdocker-compose.yml file. So run following command.

docker-compose up -d

After that we can also check if container services are running or not using this command.

docker-compose ps

Step 5: Laravel Configuration

After completing 4th step you can check laravel application is runnig fine then why we need to do this step. Actually in this fifth step we will create .env file, database configuration and artisan key etc.

So run the command to copy .env file from .env.example file.

cp .env.example .env
docker-compose exec app vim .env

And we can put database and configuration details into this .env file.

Now we will need to generate artisan key, cache clearing, run migrations. So we can do these things through the following docker compose command.

docker-compose exec app php artisan key:generate
docker-compose exec app php artisan config:cache
docker-compose exec app php artisan migrate

After following all the steps above, you have completed docker setup for laravel application with nginx, php and mysql.

#docker #laravel #nginx #mysql