Dockerized Laravel and MySQL for local development

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This guide shows you how to configure docker-compose for working with Laravel and MySQL

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Dockerfile
• docker-compose.yml
• .env file
• Gotchas

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Introduction

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=http://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