usabillabv/php-base repository overview

⁠PHP docker template

A base image for PHP application that provides a webserver instead of only the php-fpm process.

⁠What's installed

It's built based on the official Alpine Linux image⁠ (3.7) and bundles:

• PHP 7.2 inpired by the official image⁠
• Nginx 1.13 inspired by the official image⁠
• Supervisord 3.2

⁠Using and extending

Simply use this as image base of the application's Dockerfile and apply the necessary changes.

⁠Document root configuration

Nginx is configured with only one virtual host, which is using /var/www/html as document root. Ideally we should change this configuration to point to the public folder of our project, so that we expose only what's necessary.

In order to do this you should override NGINX_DOCUMENT_ROOT environment variable in the Dockerfile, e.g.:

# assuming that your project is mounted/copied to `/project` and it has a public
# folder...

ENV NGINX_DOCUMENT_ROOT="/project/public"

⁠Server name configuration

The default server name is localhost and that can also be overridden using an environment variable (NGINX_SERVER_NAME) in the Dockerfile, e.g.:

ENV NGINX_SERVER_NAME="myawesomeservice myawesomeservice.usabilla.com"

⁠Nginx workers

To use the most of your server you can tweak the number of nginx workers and connections accepted by them, the default values are (respectively): 1 and 1024. These values can be overridden using environment variables ( NGINX_WORKERS_PROCESSES and NGINX_WORKERS_CONNECTIONS) in the Dockerfile, e.g.:

ENV NGINX_WORKERS_PROCESSES="4"
ENV NGINX_WORKERS_CONNECTIONS="2048"

⁠Nginx connection keep alive timeout

The default server name is 65 and that can also be overridden using an environment variable (NGINX_KEEPALIVE_TIMEOUT) in the Dockerfile, e.g.:

ENV NGINX_KEEPALIVE_TIMEOUT="30"

⁠Nginx version

By default we are not exposing the nginx version in the Server header, that can also be overridden using an environment variable (NGINX_EXPOSE_VERSION) in the Dockerfile, e.g.:

ENV NGINX_EXPOSE_VERSION="on"

⁠Installing & enabling PHP extensions

This image bundles the same scripts available in the official PHP images to manage PHP extensions (docker-php-ext-configure, docker-php-ext-install, and docker-php-ext-enable), so it's quite simple to install core and PECL extensions.

⁠Core extensions

To install a core extension that doesn't require any change on the way PHP was compiled you only need to use docker-php-ext-install, which will compile the extra extension and enable it. To do it should include something like this to your Dockerfile:

# Enables opcache:
RUN docker-php-ext-install opcache

# Installs PDO driver for PostgreSQL (temporarily adding postgresql-dev to have
# the necessary C libraries):
RUN apk add --no-cache postgresql-client postgresql-dev \
    && docker-php-ext-install pdo_pgsql \
    && apk del postgresql-dev

Some core extensions, like GD, requires changes to PHP compilation. For that you should also use docker-php-ext-configure, e.g.:

# Installs GD extension and the required libraries: 
RUN apk add --no-cache freetype-dev libjpeg-turbo-dev libpng-dev \
    && docker-php-ext-configure gd --with-freetype-dir=/usr/include/ --with-jpeg-dir=/usr/include/ \
    && docker-php-ext-install gd

⁠PECL extensions

Some extensions are not provided with the PHP source, but are instead available through PECL⁠. To install a PECL extension, use pecl install to download and compile it, then use docker-php-ext-enable to enable it:

# Installs XDebug (temporarily adding the necessary libraries):
RUN apk add --no-cache --virtual .phpize-deps $PHPIZE_DEPS \
    && pecl install xdebug \
    && docker-php-ext-enable xdebug \
    && apk del .phpize-deps