Docker and Improving the Development Experience in Laravel and PHP Projects

You may be one of those developers who have always faced environmental issues for running Laravel and PHP projects. Problems include: lack of compatibility for the appropriate PHP version, difficulties in installing libraries, or even discrepancies in local and production environments. In such situations, Docker could serve as a powerful tool that enhances your development experience significantly.

Docker provides you with the ability to run each project in a separate container, without the worry of conflicts with other projects or issues related to versions. This effectively means creating a unique environment without hassle.

Furthermore, one of the major advantages of Docker is the ease of deploying applications. Suppose you're in the process of developing a large Laravel project and you want to deploy it on a server. By using Docker, you can package your application in a container and transfer it to any server running Docker with ease.

Docker Compose also allows you to easily configure all the dependencies of your applications such as web servers (like Nginx) and databases (like MySQL or PostgreSQL). Let’s take a look at a simple example:

version: '3'
services:
  app:
    image: php:7.4-fpm
    container_name: laravel_app
    volumes:
      - .:/var/www/html
    networks:
      - laravel_network
  web:
    image: nginx:alpine
    container_name: laravel_web
    volumes:
      - .:/var/www/html
      - ./nginx.conf:/etc/nginx/nginx.conf
    ports:
      - "80:80"
    networks:
      - laravel_network
  db:
    image: mysql:5.7
    container_name: laravel_db
    environment:
      MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: secret
      MYSQL_DATABASE: laravel
    networks:
      - laravel_network
networks:
  laravel_network:
    driver: bridge

version: '3': specifies the version of Docker Compose being used.
services: defines all the services that are being used in the application.
app: is the PHP service for the application that uses the image php:7.4-fpm.
web: is the service related to Nginx for hosting the web application.
db: is the database service using MySQL, which has specified requirements like root password and database name.
networks: configures the networks connecting the services, specified here as bridge.

Therefore, with Docker and Docker Compose, you can accurately manage your environmental needs just as you need and easily share these configurations with team members.