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I have a simple Laravel application with Nginx, PHP and MySQL each in its own container. What I don't understand is:
why do I need to mount volumes for both my Nginx and also PHP? Isn't PHP only a programming language not a server?
Also, for production do I need to COPY my src to /var/www/html but do I need to do it for both Nginx and PHP? Or only for Nginx?
Here is my docker-compose-dev.yml file
version: '3'
networks:
laravel:
services:
nginx:
image: nginx:stable-alpine
container_name: nginxcontainer
ports:
- "8088:80"
volumes:
- ./src:/var/www/html
- ./nginx/default.conf:/etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf
depends_on:
- php
- mysql
networks:
- laravel
mysql:
image: mysql:5.7.22
container_name: mysqlcontainer
restart: unless-stopped
tty: true
ports:
- "4306:3306"
volumes:
- ./mysql:/var/lib/mysql
environment:
MYSQL_DATABASE: homestead
MYSQL_USER: homestead
MYSQL_PASSWORD: secret
MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: secret
SERVICE_TAGS: dev
SERVICE_NAME: mysql
networks:
- laravel
php:
build:
context: .
dockerfile: php/Dockerfile-dev
container_name: phpcontainer
volumes:
- ./src:/var/www/html
ports:
- "9000:9000"
networks:
- laravel
and here is my php/Docker-dev file
FROM php:7.2-fpm-alpine
RUN docker-php-ext-install pdo pdo_mysql
RUN chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www
RUN chmod 755 /var/www
In your case it seems that they use everything the same but it is a bit misleading cause take a look at what I use:
version: '3'
services:
php:
volumes:
- ./:/var/www
nginx:
volumes:
- ./public:/var/www/public
So you see they require different paths to access. Nginx needs where your app starting point (public/index.php) and PHP needs the whole project.
Thank you for the help, @bugsysha. I'm a little confused. How could I make this for production instead of mounting volumes for local development?
For example, is this correct?
nginx:
COPY . /var/www/html
php:
COPY . /var/www/html
I only use docker-compose so I'm not sure but I do not have any COPY instructions in my Dockerfile and also none in docker-compose.yml.
@bugsysha How do you deploy it to another server without COPY?
One of the steps is git clone.
What you decide to do here depends on your use case.
For local development, mounting volumes is often required so you can have code on your local machine that the containers can see.
A note about PHP-FPM with Nginx: The most common Nginx configuration to use with php-fpm actually requires that Nginx "sees" the
*.phpfile on the server before it decides to send it to php-fpm instead. If it doesn't find the file, it returns a 404 error. This is why if you have Nginx and PHP-FPM in separate containers, they both often need volume mounts.I tend to install php-fpm and Nginx in one container for this reason. See Vessel for an example of that.
For production, code is often built into a Docker image (via COPY), and that container can then be deployed wherever based on that new image with that code.
I do that method, and tag each new image with the commit sha (and "retag" the latest image as tag latest - so the same image is tagged twice). This way I have a history of built images at each commit sha.
Hope that makes sense!
@martinszeltins I think you do not need to mount the PHP code in the nginx container. It comes down to how your webserver is configured. e.g.:
version: "3.9"
networks:
proxy:
external: true
laravel:
services:
nginx:
image: nginx:stable-alpine
container_name: "nginxcontainer"
ports:
- "8088:80"
networks:
- laravel
depends_on:
- php-fpm
volumes:
- ./nginx/default.conf:/etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf
php-fpm:
image: php:8.2-fpm-alpine
container_name: "phpcontainer"
networks:
- laravel
volumes:
- ./app:/var/www/html
working_dir: /var/www/html
Then your default.conf for nginx could look like the following
# ./nginx/default.conf
server {
index index.php index.html;
error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log;
access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log;
location / {
rewrite ^ /index.php last;
}
location ~* \.php$ {
root /var/www/html/public;
fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.*)$;
fastcgi_pass php-fpm:9000;
fastcgi_index index.php;
fastcgi_read_timeout 9000;
include fastcgi_params;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
fastcgi_param DOCUMENT_ROOT $document_root;
}
}
@snguimjeu the nginx config doesn't make sense since it does not actually have access to any files therefore how could root /var/www/html/public; even work?
@martinszeltins I'm currently playing around with this particular setup and there are a couple of things playing together:
This part will redirect to index.php
# default.conf
location / {
rewrite ^ /index.php last;
}
and this part says index.php is "found" on php-fpm container at the given location (root)
# default.conf
location ~* \.php$ {
root /var/www/html/public;
fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.*)$;
fastcgi_pass php-fpm:9000;
fastcgi_index index.php;
...
}
The docker-compose.yml should be enough to reproduce and test this behavior.
@snguimjeu Excellent. Your answer solved all issues about mutual mounting of PHP files. Thank you
In this week I stumbled into this problem myself. My solution was this docker documentation in docs.docker.com/storage/ which says:
If you mount an empty volume into a directory in the container in which files or directories exist, these files or directories are propagated (copied) into the volume. Similarly, if you start a container and specify a volume which does not already exist, an empty volume is created for you. This is a good way to pre-populate data that another container needs.
So my solution was just to mount an empty volume under
services:
nginx:
image: nginx:1.25
volumes:
- my-volume:/var/www
php:
image: my-custom/image:latest
volumes:
- my-volume:/var/www
volumes:
my-volume:
After this, the static files were perfectly served to nginx from the php-fpm container which in this case has all the code that needed to be shared with nginx.
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