Dockerized Laravel and MySQL for local development

| programming | devops | php |

Docker is awesome. Its also quite useful for local development. The following Dockerfile and docker-compose.yml will be helpful if you want to do laravel development inside of docker. I am using Ubuntu as a base, but you can probably use the official PHP image as well. Dockerfile

FROM ubuntu:16.04

RUN apt update
RUN apt install -y php7.0 php7.0-zip php7.0-mbstring phpunit curl php7.0-mysql


RUN curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php
RUN mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer


RUN composer global require “laravel/installer”


RUN export PATH=$HOME/.config/composer/vendor/bin:$PATH

docker-compose.yml 
version: '2'
services:
  app:
    build: .
    ports:
      - "8000:8000"
    volumes:
      - .:/code
    env_file: .env
    working_dir: /code
    command: bash -c 'php artisan migrate && php artisan serve --host 0.0.0.0'
    depends_on:
      - db
  db:
    image: "mysql:5.7"
    environment:
      - MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=password
      - MYSQL_DATABASE=$your_db
      - MYSQL_USER=$your_db_user
      - MYSQL_PASSWORD=$your_db_password
    volumes:
      - ./data/:/var/lib/mysql
    ports:
      - "3306:3306"
.env file Your .env file is what Laravel uses when it starts up set up various things. The only real thing to change is your DB connection info. A full sample is shown below: 
APP_ENV=local
APP_KEY=$your_app_key
APP_DEBUG=true
APP_LOG_LEVEL=debug
APP_URL=https://localhost

DB_CONNECTION=mysql
DB_HOST=db
DB_PORT=3306
DB_DATABASE=$your_db
DB_USERNAME=$your_db_user
DB_PASSWORD=$your_db_password


BROADCAST_DRIVER=log
CACHE_DRIVER=file
SESSION_DRIVER=file
QUEUE_DRIVER=sync


REDIS_HOST=127.0.0.1
REDIS_PASSWORD=null
REDIS_PORT=6379


MAIL_DRIVER=smtp
MAIL_HOST=mailtrap.io
MAIL_PORT=2525
MAIL_USERNAME=null
MAIL_PASSWORD=null
MAIL_ENCRYPTION=null


PUSHER_APP_ID=
PUSHER_KEY=
PUSHER_SECRET=

Gotchas

  1. In order to do stuff with the database you should add the following record to your local /etc/hosts file 
    # /etc/hosts

    127.0.0.1 db

  2. You should still install npm and run npm install from your local machine so that you can do frontend stuff.
  3. Since we define - .:/code as a volume, this means that all of your local changes are immediately visible in the dockerized app.
  4. If you need to access the running app or db container you can do so with docker-compose run app bash or docker-compose run db bash

Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.

Check out some more stuff to read down below.

Most popular posts this month

Recent Favorite Blog Posts

This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.

Articles from blogs I follow around the net

Un momento en Mazamitla

La semana pasada tuve un tiempo de desconexión en Mazamitla, un bosque con cabañas, naturaleza y paz.

via Martin Morales January 31, 2026

Sketches

I've been sticking to a sketching routine recently: every day I draw at least once face.Faces are different for me than any other kind of drawing. Somewhere in the process the face looks real enough for me to recognize it as a human being, if it's…

via macwright.com January 31, 2026

Pi: The Minimal Agent Within OpenClaw

If you haven’t been living under a rock, you will have noticed this week that a project of my friend Peter went viral on the internet. It went by many names. The most recent one is OpenClaw but in the news you might have encountered it as ClawdBot or MoltBot…

via Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings January 31, 2026

Generated by openring