A Docker image and docker-compose config for quickly setting up an environment with Laravel 5.3.

Inspired by Bitnami's project but I had problems trying to figure out how to do some things and I wanted to learn Docker so I started from scratch and learnt stuff while creating it step-by-step.

Quick start

Copy the docker-compose.yml file to your computer. Now run:

docker-compose up -d

docker-compose exec app setup-laravel

You should have a working Laravel app on http://localhost (or your docker machine's address/ip).

If you want to create the basic authentication scaffolding, you can now run:

docker-compose exec app php artisan make:auth
docker-compose exec app php artisan migrate

Similarly, most commands should be run in the container. You can run some directly on your machine, for instance if you have composer, you should be able to use it without prefixing it with "docker-compose exec app". But npm install will certainly need to be run in the container, the same with any artisan commands that access the database etc., you get the picture.

Containers

As you'll see in docker-compose.yml this environment consists of

• the app server image
• a vanilla MySQL image

Software

Most importantly:

• Laravel 5.3
• Laravel Elixir
• Nginx
• PHP (obviously)
• MySQL (in the separate image)

Also featured:

• nodejs
• npm
• git
• composer
• gulp
• bower
• vim
• curl

User and app folder setup

There's a user called deploy with passwordless sudo privileges.

The folder for the app is in this user's home folder: /home/deploy/public/app

node_modules and vendor/bin are only accessible in the container because they contain symlinks which causes problems on Windows.

Running commands

The current user in the container is deploy and the working directory is /home/deploy/public/app, so you can do this for instance:

docker-compose exec app php artisan --version

The deploy user has passwordless sudo.