Dockerized Laravel and MySQL for local development

April 8, 2017 | 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

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
```
You should still install npm and run npm install from your local machine so that you can do frontend stuff.
Since we define - .:/code as a volume, this means that all of your local changes are immediately visible in the dockerized app.
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.

The Software Essays that Shaped Me from Refactoring English
Give Your Spouse the Gift of a Couple's Email Domain from mtlynch.io
Skip the Next iPhone from Articles on Jose M.
Have smart glasses finally hit an inflection point? from The Torment Nexus
The McPhee method from the jsomers.net blog
Pluralistic: LLMs are slot-machines (16 Aug 2025) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Pluralistic: Bluesky creates the world's weirdest, hardest-to-understand binding arbitration clause (15 Aug 2025) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Just a Little More Context Bro, I Promise, and It’ll Fix Everything from Jim Nielsen’s Blog

Articles from blogs I follow around the net

On concrete examples

I had some great conversations via email over the past couple of weeks with a bunch of different people, discussing all sorts of things that I’ll for sure end up writing about. Today I wanted to briefly touch on the topic of examples, which was pa…

via Manuel Moreale — Everything Feed October 16, 2025

Hacking Workshop for November 2025

For next month, I'm scheduling 2 or 3 discussions of Matthias van de Meent's talk, Improving scalability; Reducing overhead in shared memory, given at 2025.pgconf.dev (talk description here). If you're interested in joining us, please sign up …

via Robert Haas October 16, 2025

Should we be afraid of AI? Maybe a little

Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote a piece for The Torment Nexus about the threat of AI, and more specifically what some call "artificial general intelligence" or AGI, which is a shorthand term for something that approaches human-like intelligence…

via The Torment Nexus October 16, 2025

Generated by openring