Containerizing legacy PHP Laravel project

Question

I have to containerize a legacy PHP Laravel application and deploy it in an EKS cluster, and as I am completely new to both PHP and Laravel, I am currently having some difficulties.

After googling some examples of a Laravel Dockerfile, there seems to be many different methods of doing this and I had some trouble understanding and executing the process.

In one of the blogs I found, it seems to use a Dockerfile and a docker-compose.yaml file to containerize the application like the one used below.

FROM php:7.3-fpm
# step 2
WORKDIR /root
RUN apt-get update
RUN apt-get install -y curl
# step 3
RUN curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php
RUN mv composer.phar /usr/bin/composer
# step 4
RUN apt-get install -y zlib1g-dev && apt-get install -y libzip-dev
RUN docker-php-ext-install zip
# step 5
RUN composer global require laravel/installer
RUN ["/bin/bash", "-c", "echo PATH=$PATH:~/.composer/vendor/bin/ >> ~/.bashrc"]
RUN ["/bin/bash", "-c", "source ~/.bashrc"]
# step 6
EXPOSE 9000
CMD ["php-fpm"]

version: '3'
services:
  proxy:
    image: nginx:latest
    ports:
      - "80:80"
    volumes:
      - ./proxy/nginx.conf:/etc/nginx/nginx.conf
  web:
    image: nginx:latest
    expose:
      - "8080"
    volumes:
      - ./source:/source
      - ./nginx/default.conf:/etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf
  php:
    build:
      context: .
      dockerfile: php/Dockerfile
    volumes:
      - ./source:/source

I am guessing that the nginx is used for the web application server, kind of how Apache Tomcat is used in Spring Boot, but other than that, I am a little bit unclear on why there needs to be a yaml file for this.

In addition, I composed using the Docker and docker-compose.yaml file with the following command.

docker build -t website -f Dockerfile .

I did succeed in exporting the image, but I seem to have trouble running a container using this image.

It would be sincerely appreciate if you could tell me what I am doing wrong.

Thank you in advance!

Answer 1

Building with the Dockerfile only builds the php-fpm image, to run the container you should at least have one http server (like nginx) that forwards the requests to the php-fpm, there's probably something about that in ./proxy/nginx.conf,

It is also possible to build everything in 1 image (nginx, php-fpm), you probably want to start with something different then php:7.3-fpm (I usually start with alpine or ubuntu). Then its possible to run that image as a container and handle http requests.