Dockerise your PHP application with Nginx and PHP7-FPM

Before we start…

Before we start, we have to agree on one thing – Docker is super cool! If you are not familiar with Docker, I suggest to have a look at the tons of “Getting starting with Docker” or “What is Docker?” articles and then come back here. :)
Since you keep reading, I will assume that you already have some Docker experience and you want to run your PHP applications in containers. Because who wants the trouble of installing all the dependencies on their local environment  or manage a number of virtual machines for their different projects, right? Right!

The goal that we will try to achieve is to run a simple PHP application using the official Docker repositories for both PHP and Nginx. There are several docker repositories combining PHP-FPM with Nginx, but depending on the official repositories gives you several benefits, like using a service which is configured by its maintainers and you can always choose between the latest and greatest or different versions of both services, instead of relying on someone else’s choices.

The first thing you have to do is, of course, install Docker (if you haven’t already). The second prerequisite is getting Docker Compose (it is included in the Mac toolbox).  Now that we know what we want to achieve and have the tools to accomplish it – let’s get our hands dirty!

Setting up Nginx

We’ll start by getting ourselves a web server and based on our requirements this will be a container running the official Nginx image. Since we’ll be using Docker Compose, we will create the following docker-compose.yml file, which will run the latest Nginx image and will expose its port 80 to port 8080:

web:
 image: nginx:latest
 ports:
 - "8080:80"

Now we can run

docker-compose up

This should give you the default Nginx screen on port 8080 for localhost or the IP of your docker machine.

Now that we have a server let’s add some code. First we have to update the docker-compose.yml to mount a local directory. I will use a folder called code, which is in the same directory as my docker-compose.yml file, and it will be mounted as root folder code in the container.

web:
    image: nginx:latest
    ports:
        - "8080:80"
    volumes:
        - ./code:/code

The next step is to let Nginx know that this folder exists.
Let’s create the following site.conf on the same level as the docker-compose.yml file:

server {
    index index.html;
    server_name php-docker.local;
    error_log  /var/log/nginx/error.log;
    access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log;
    root /code;
}

If you don’t have a lot of experience with Nginx, this is what we define here – index.html will be our default index, the server name is php-docker.local and it should be pointing (update your hosts file) to your Docker environment (localhost if you are on Linux or the docker machine if you are on Mac or Windows), we point the error logs to be the ones exposed by the default container, so that we will see the errors in our docker compose log, and finally we specify the root folder to be the one that we mounted in the container.

To activate this setup we need to apply yet another modification to our docker-compose.yml file:

web:
    image: nginx:latest
    ports:
        - "8080:80"
    volumes:
        - ./code:/code
        - ./site.conf:/etc/nginx/conf.d/site.conf

This will add site.conf to the directory where Nginx is looking for configuration files to include. You can now place an index.html file in the code folder with contents that is to your heart’s delight. And if we run

docker-compose up

again, the index.html file should be available on php-docker.local:8080.

Yeey! We are half way there

Adding PHP-FPM

Now that we have Nginx up and running let’s add the PHP in the game. The first thing we’ll do is pull the official PHP7-FPM repo and link it to our Nginx container. Our docker-compose.yml will look like this now:

web:
    image: nginx:latest
    ports:
        - "8080:80"
    volumes:
        - ./code:/code
        - ./site.conf:/etc/nginx/conf.d/site.conf
    links:
        - php
php:
    image: php:7-fpm

The next thing to do is configure Nginx to use the PHP-FPM container for interpreting PHP files. Your updated site.conf should look like this:

server {
    index index.php index.html;
    server_name php-docker.local;
    error_log  /var/log/nginx/error.log;
    access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log;
    root /code;

    location ~ \.php$ {
        try_files $uri =404;
        fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
        fastcgi_pass php:9000;
        fastcgi_index index.php;
        include fastcgi_params;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $fastcgi_path_info;
    }
}

In order to test this let’s rename the index.html file to index.php and replace its content with the standard:

<?php
echo phpinfo();

One final

docker-compose up

And we should be good to go... but

Instead of getting the proper PHP info page we receive the rather unsettling

File not found.

Since PHP is running in its own environment (container) it doesn't have access to the code. In order to fix this, we need to mount the code folder in the PHP container too. This way Nginx will be able to serve any static files, and PHP will be able to find the files it has to interpret. One final change to the docker-compose.yml:

web:
    image: nginx:latest
    ports:
        - "8080:80"
    volumes:
        - ./code:/code
        - ./site.conf:/etc/nginx/conf.d/site.conf
    links:
        - php
php:
    image: php:7-fpm
    volumes:
        - ./code:/code

Finally, this last (this time for real)

docker-compose up

present us with the much wanted PHP info

This is it.

We can run any simple PHP application inside Docker containers, using the official images for Nginx and PHP.

You can find the sample project here https://github.com/mikechernev/dockerised-php

EDIT: Since the GitHub repository changed quite a lot, I added a new blog post explaining the improvements - Making your dockerised PHP application even better

223 thoughts on “Dockerise your PHP application with Nginx and PHP7-FPM”

  1. Raitis says:

    This article is pretty much just about how to run php and nginx apps locally. How do you build images and deploy them to other environment. When Im using docker I dont want to put source code on the host instances. I want to run containers and thats it.

    Reply
    • J Murrell says:

      Using snippets of code here, I built a LEMP stack and deployed that to my swarm. To preserve the data, and ensure that all nodes can run the containers, I gave all the nodes access to a central datastore.

      Reply

  3. If I follow ./site.conf:/etc/nginx/conf.d/site.conf it will not work, but if I changed to ./site.conf:/etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf then it will work and I use image: php:7.2-fpm

    Reply
      • Snowy says:

        That’s because you need to request the virtual host of “php-docker.local” (as in the example) as set in site.conf: server_name

        You won’t find it because you’re hitting the default nginx host, not the named virtual host.

        Reply
  5. Waldemar Enns says:

    When i follow all of your steps, i gninx always opens the default nginx html (Welcomet to nginx etc.). It seems that my configuration with the code directory does not get into count when building with docker-compose.

    Can you help me with that?

    Reply
  7. Jeremy McJunkin says:

    If I use the volume as defined: ./site.conf:/etc/nginx/conf.d/site.conf I get an error as @SonyAK mentions. However, if I change to ./config/site.conf:/etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf like mentioned, I get an different error:
    ERROR: for f56b8ca52bb8_build_web_1 Cannot start service web: b’OCI runtime create failed: container_linux.go:348: starting container process caused “process_linux.go:402: container init caused \\”rootfs_linux.go:58: mounting \\\\\\”/Users/jeremymcjunkin/Dropbox/workspaces/doapp/feed-cleaning/build/site.conf\\\\\\” to rootfs \\\\\\”/var/lib/docker/overlay2/6916bf26b4516db40db3c3e4db8059541db5cc423caa774965845271d9f33186/merged\\\\\\” at \\\\\\”/var/lib/docker/overlay2/6916bf26b4516db40db3c3e4db8059541db5cc423caa774965845271d9f33186/merged/etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf\\\\\\” caused \\\\\\”not a directory\\\\\\”\\””: unknown: Are you trying to mount a directory onto a file (or vice-versa)? Check if the specified host path exists and is the expected type’

    Reply
    • Jeremy McJunkin says:

      Hmm, it looks like the volume path is relative to the location of the docker-compose file. I had the docker-compose file in a build/ directory, that is why I had the issue.

      Reply
      • Sricharan says:

        This is my folder structure

        proj
        – code
        – docker-compose.yml
        – site.conf

        What are the necessary changes i have to do to overcome the above issue?

        Reply
  8. Vartan says:

    Hello,
    Thank you for this helpfull topic!!
    Really great article!
    Can you please add in this tutorial the way to add a mysql server too.

    Thanks a lot!

    Reply

    • I replaced simple strings for passwords. Else use env variables for group projects

      “`
      version: “3”
      services:
      web:
      image: nginx:latest
      ports:
      – “9999:80”
      volumes:
      – ./code:/code
      – ./site.conf:/etc/nginx/conf.d/site.conf
      links:
      – php
      php:
      # image: php:7-fpm-stretch
      build:
      context: .
      dockerfile: “dockerfiles/php/Dockerfile”
      volumes:
      – ./code:/code
      mysql:
      image: mysql:8.0
      container_name: mysql-server-80
      command: –default-authentication-plugin=mysql_native_password
      volumes:
      – ./code:/code
      restart: always
      environment:
      – MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=.pass.
      – MYSQL_DATABASE=my_db
      – MYSQL_USER=db_user
      – MYSQL_PASSWORD=.pass
      ports:
      – “8082:3306”
      “`

      The dockerfile I reference for the PHP build phase looks like:

      “`
      FROM php:7-fpm
      WORKDIR ‘/code’
      RUN docker-php-ext-install mysqli && docker-php-ext-enable mysqli
      “`

      Reply

      • Alright, that got butchered. I hope you get the idea. Use an online yaml linter if needed to make sure you get the right denting. This is just adapted from the OP in this article, so it should work.

        Happy keystroking!

        Reply

  13. Thx buddy.
    Idk y when I put my site.conf in the conf.d folder it does work. It also should work if you put the file inside the site-enabled, but it doesn’t.
    Anyway, thank you so much, it helped me a lot. I am still understanding how docker works.

    Reply
    • Snowy says:

      cos the virtual host in the example is docker.local, so unless you’re accessing http://docker.local:8080 (you’ll have to set this up in your /etc/hosts) you’re going to get parsed by the default host, rather than the virtual host for docker.local as set up in site.conf

      I assume you’re trying the example as http://localhost:8080 when this fails.

      Reply
  16. chey says:

    You have to do it like this now.

    version: ‘3’
    services:
    web:
    image: nginx:alpine
    ports:
    – “8090:80”
    links:
    – api
    volumes:
    – www-data:/var/www/html
    – ./site.conf:/etc/nginx/conf.d/site.conf
    api:
    image: php:fpm-alpine
    volumes:
    – www-data:/var/www/html

    volumes:
    www-data:

    Notice the last part for *volumes*. It’s a shared name between the two containers.

    Reply
  20. Motion4Life says:

    Hey, great article. I have 3 questions left though.
    Would be nice if somebody could answer them. :-)

    1) I can only make it work, when I put rename the site.conf -> nginx.conf and place it inside
    /etc/nginx/
    Anyone an idea, why that is?

    2) Inside docker-compose-yml
    To we need to specifiy

    links:
    – php

    Since we did not specify the bride drivers for the network,
    docker-compose will create a network based on the location name of the file.
    Consequently, – unlike inside the bridge network – a DNS server is installed.
    Would not it make the links: unnecessary?

    3)
    I know that include_param is similiar to mime.types to interpret file types correctly inside the package header. However, what are

    fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
    fastcgi_pass php:9000;
    fastcgi_index index.php;
    fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
    fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $fastcgi_path_info;

    for? Again, nice post.

    Reply

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