Example PHP/Nginx/MySQL/RabbitMQ App with Docker

This is a template project to get a PHP/Nginx/MySQL/PHPMyAdmin/RabbitMQ development environment up and running via Docker on your local machine. The only thing you need on your host machine is Docker and Composer

Using Docker

Getting the environment up and running with Docker

Make sure you have Docker installed on your machine.

Get the code from this repository, install PHP dependencies with composer and fire up the containers with Docker:

cd docker_php_app

cd src

composer install

cd ../

docker compose up

Some more Docker commands and what they do:

Start containers

docker compose up

Stop running containers

docker compose stop

Stop and remove containers, networks, volumes and images

docker compose down

Down and remove all volumes in dockerfile and those not

docker compose down -v

Down and remove images that don't have a custom tag

docker compose down --rmi <all|local>

Making changes to Docker containers and related files

If you make changes to docker-compose.yml and/or related docker files (such as editing docker/php/Dockerfile to install more packages on to the virtual machine image) then you will need to recreate the images and rebuild them from scratch. Do docker compose down -v to remove all running containers and then docker compose up --build --force-recreate --remove-orphans to make sure everything (including the container base images via --build flag) get created from scratch.

You might need to use sudo as do on Ubuntu 24.

Useful Docker commands

1. sudo docker container ls --all list all Docker containers on your machine
2. sudo docker exec -it {CONTAINER_NAME} /bin/sh open an interactive shell on a given container. For example with the default docker-composer.yml you can use docker exec -it docker_php_app-nginx-1 /bin/sh to open an interactive shell on to the Nginx container.
3. sudo docker image prune -a if you get any error about max depth exceeded when doing a docker compsoe up.

MySQL Specific Setup

Listens on Port 3310

So as not to clash with any existing MySQL Server installation on your host machine, the MySQL container is setup to use port 3333 on the host machine and forward to 3306 on the container. Access MySQL via your preferred tool on 127.0.0.1 or localhost using port 3333 with the root user with password password.

MySQL Initialisation Script

docker/mysql/init.sql has a default setup of SQL to be run once MySQL is up and runnining. It recreates example database and an app user allowing connections from localhost and anywhere (%) and with all permissions granted.

phpMyAdmin

You can visit http://localhost:8001 to get to phpMyAdmin.

Nginx Specific Setup

Listens on Port 8000

So as not to clash with any existing Nginx installation on your host machine, the Nginx container is setup to use port 8000 on the host machien and forward to 80 on the container. Access the hosted site via http://localhost:8080/

Your code goes in the src folder and is shared via a docker volume into /var/www/html/. This allow you to make changes to your code in src and refresh the site in your browser to see live changes.

Nginx default.conf

docker/nginx/default.conf is copied to the container to setup the basic Nginx server configuration. If you need to modify this and recreate the image and container, modify that file and then run sudo docker-compose down -v followed by sudo docker compose up --build --force-recreate --remove-orphans. Warning data will be lost! docker/nginx/Dockerfile copies default.conf into place. The default configuration is to use port 9000 for the php-fpm process.

PHP Specific Setup

PHP/HTML Code

Put your code in the src folder. By default there is an index.php file in there with a phpinfo(); call. Make changes to you code in this folder, refresh the site in your browser to see changes.

Test MySQL Connectivity

Visit http://localhost:8000/mysql_test.php to test connectivity to the MySQL Server container. You should see user1 and user2 lsited on the page. Check the source of that file to see that the records are pulled from MySQL.

PHP 8.2.x with some extra modules

Extra PHP Modules installed are:

1. imagick
2. mysqli
3. pdo
4. pdo_mysql
5. bcmath
6. intl
7. sockets

You can edit docker/php/Dockerfile if you don't want all of these but I have them for running CakePHP applications and using Image Magic.

Executing additional PHP scripts from the container

Sometimes you might want to run PHP scripts from within the container itself, such as a PHP script that is a consumer for a RabbitMQ Queue. Open an interactive shell to the PHP container sudo docker exec -it docker_php_app-php-1 /bin/sh which will by default cd you into /var/www/html and from there you can do php somefile.php to execute a script. You can also run any other command you like as it is a terminal. Type exit to leave the container and return to your own shell.

RabbitMQ Specific Setup

Admin interface on Port 15674

So as not to clash with any existing RabbitMQ installation on your host machine, the RabbitMQ admin interface is setup to run on port 15674 and you can use http://localhost:15674 in your browser to access it. The default login is admin with password.

Listens on Port 5674

So as not to clash with any existing RabbitMQ installation on your host machine, the RabbitMQ service is setup to listen on port 5674.

Test RabbitMQ Connectivity

Visit http://localhost:8000/rabbitmq_test.php and if all is well the page will be blank and you'll see in the RabbitMQ interface that the test_queue was created and a mesasge was put onto the queue for each page reload.