CakePHP and Docker
We all know that while developing a CakePHP software, we need to have a local environment with PHP, HTTP Server (nginx, apache) and a database (MySql, Postgres, Mongodb, etc). Installing those tools directly to your system is the basic way, but it can become a bit tricky when we have multiple projects using different versions of those tools... that’s where Docker will help us. In this article, we will show a quick docker setup to improve our CakePHP local environment.
If you don’t have docker installed go to: https://docs.docker.com/get-docker/. It is available for Linux, MacOS and Windows.
For our setup we are going to use PHP, Nginx, and Mysql. All of the information required will be added to a new file named docker-compose.yml. In our environment we will need two docker images [https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/commandline/images/], one image for php + nginx and one for mysql.
Setup Nginx + PHP service
Create the file docker-compose.yml inside your application with this:
version: "3.1"
services:
php-fpm:
image: webdevops/php-nginx:7.4
container_name: myapp-webserver
working_dir: /app
volumes:
- ./:/app
environment:
- WEB_DOCUMENT_ROOT=/app/webroot
ports:
- "80:80"
Now,we have a service named php-fpm, which is able to run php 7.4 and nginx at port 80 pointing to our webroot dir. Important note: the container_name must be unique in your system.
Setup MySql service
Our MySql service requires a username, password and database name. For this, we are going to create the file mysql.env (don’t use a weak password in production, you could share a mysql.env.default file with your team) with this content:
MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=password
MYSQL_DATABASE=my_app
MYSQL_USER=my_user
MYSQL_PASSWORD=password
Now, at the end of docker-compose.yml , add this:
mysql:
image: mysql:5.6
container_name: myapp-mysql
working_dir: /app
volumes:
- .:/app
- ./tmp/data/mysql_db:/var/lib/mysql
env_file:
- mysql.env
command: mysqld --character-set-server=utf8 --init-connect='SET NAMES UTF8;'
ports:
- "3306:3306"
Before we start this service, lets add the service for our database, include this at the end of the file: docker-compose.yml .
You’ll see that we have - ./tmp/data/mysql_db:/var/lib/mysql, this allows us to persist mysql data. Now we also have a service named mysql with one empty database named my_app and a user name my_user.
Starting the services and app configuration
Before we continue, make sure that you don’t have any other http server or mysql server running.
Now that we have finished our docker-compose.yml we can execute docker-compose up to start the services and access the app at http://localhost. The next thing you need to do is update your database configuration with the correct credentials - the host is the service name, in our case it is “mysql”:
'host' => ‘mysql’,
'username' => 'my_user',
'password' => ‘password’,
'database' => 'my_app',
That’s it! Now we have a working local environment for our CakePHP app. We can now access the services using docker-compose exec php-fpm bash and docker-compose exec mysql bash.
The files mentioned here (docker-compose.yml and mysql.env) can be found at https://gist.github.com/CakeDCTeam/263a65336a85baab2667e08c907bfff6.
The icing on the cake
Going one step further, we could add some alias (with linux) to make it even easier. Let’s add these lines at the end of your ~/.bashrc file:
alias cake="docker-compose exec -u $(id -u ${USER}):$(id -g ${USER}) php-fpm bin/cake"
alias fpm="docker-compose exec -u $(id -u ${USER}):$(id -g ${USER}) php-fpm"
alias composer="docker-compose exec -u $(id -u ${USER}):$(id -g ${USER}) php-fpm composer"
With those entries, instead of typing docker-compose exec php-fpm bin/cake, we can just type cake. The other two aliases are for composer and bash. Notice that we have ${USER}? This will ensure that we are using the same user inside the services.
Additional information
Normally docker images allow us to customize the service, for webdevops/php-nginx:7.4 - you can check more information at: https://dockerfile.readthedocs.io/en/latest/content/DockerImages/dockerfiles/php-nginx.html and for mysql check: https://hub.docker.com/_/mysql . You can find more images at: https://hub.docker.com/.
If you are not familiar with docker, take a look at: https://docs.docker.com/get-started/overview/, as this documentation provides good information.
Hope you have enjoyed this article and will take advantage of docker while working in your CakePHP application.
