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

Changes in the system prompt between Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.7

Anthropic are the only major AI lab to publish the system prompts for their user-facing chat systems. Their system prompt archive now dates all the way back to Claude 3 in July 2024 and it's always interesting to see how the system prompt evolves as they p...

via Simon Willison's Weblog: Entries April 18, 2026

You Can Message Me From My Website Now

I came across a rather interesting idea (via Intial Charge): I added a widget to every page here that lets anyone in the world immediately send me a notification. Type a message, hit send, and it’ll...

via Chris Hannah April 18, 2026

Rhea Finance exploited for $18.4 million, some recovered

Rhea Finance's lending product was exploited for around $18.4 million after an attacker took advantage of a bug in the platform's slippage protection feature. The stolen assets affected both platform and user funds.Some of the stolen tokens were returned b...

via Web3 is Going Just Great April 18, 2026

Generated by openring