This is a reasonably configured development environment for PHP devs, especially those familiar with Laravel and Laravel Valet.

Run multiple projects at once with specific PHP versions isolated to each project. Want site-01.test run on PHP 8.1, while the site-02.test is running on PHP 7.3? This Docker-based setup makes that process a breeze.

This is only for development and was not meant to be used in production!

1. Make sure Docker is installed in your system.

2. Clone this repository somewhere on your machine. If you work under WSL2, clone it inside WSL.

3. The next steps will assume that you cloned it into ~/code on your machine. But you can use any directory you'd like.

4. Create a directory named projects inside the code directory. That's where you will put your projects.

5. Inside the server directory, find and copy nginx/default directory to the same path as config directory: nginx/config. That's the Nginx config that your Nginx container will use.

6. Inside the server/nginx directory, created the sites-enabled directory. That directory will contain Nginx virtual hosts for your projects.

7. Inside the server directory, copy docker-compose-template.yml file as docker-compose.yml.

8. In the docker-compose.yml, replace the placeholder project names with your projects and follow the pattern in the comments there to add more projects. Each PHP container ("service") in docker-compose file needs to mount volumes of the projects that use its PHP version.

9. Build the containers for the first time. Docker will create the "apps" network for this environment:

   • docker-compose up --build --detach

10. Edit your computer OS hosts file and add .test domains of your projects, following this pattern:

    • 127.0.0.1 your-project-domain.test

After that initial installation, you can launch the whole environment with docker-compose up and stop it with docker-compose down, as you normally would with Docker containers.

This is what your whole code directory structure should look like when you set it all up:

This environment includes MySQL 5.7.37 and MySQL 8.0.28 as separate service containers, persisting data in separate volumes on the disk.

If you need to access either of those with an external tool, each service exposes its own port:

• MySQL 5.7 exposes port 33057
• MySQL 8 exposes port 33080

Out of the box, this setup provides the ability to run PHP 7.3, PHP 7.4, PHP 8.0, and PHP 8.1 simultaneously — in isolated containers. That way, you can have your projects use a specific version of PHP and run Composer commands under it.

You can even duplicate a project running on one version of PHP and set it up with a different version, running both at the same time but in isolation from each other, which can be very useful if you want to upgrade the PHP version on your production server and need to test your app with it first.

Inside server/nginx/config directory you created, edit the default.conf file and put your own domain/php version pairs, following the existing pattern and the instructions in the comments in the file. After editing it, run docker-compose down and docker-compose up inside the server directory for changes to propagate.

I've added Composer into the containers of each PHP version instead of setting it up as as separate service. That means you can use it in isolation with the docker exec command on a container of the specific PHP version, and Composer will run with that particular version, so you know that your dependencies are installed with the version of PHP that your project is using.

This environment is highly configurable, and you can add or remove services as you please. What I was aiming at by default is a bare-bones environment to quickly whip up and run plain PHP or Laravel projects, locally. You have Mailhog already available, but feel free to add Redis and other services to your docker-compose.yml, at will.

All the PHP versions are using the development configuration of php.ini, the files used are located in server/php-config directory, separated by versions. I've increased the default timeouts to 300 seconds and uploaded file sizes to 1G in all the configs.

If you need to add a new PHP version, create a Dockerfile for it (name it according to the PHP version you'll use). You can follow the same pattern of the existing Dockerfiles, but make sure to check documentation of the container you want to import as there might be nuances in extension installation instructions, etc.

Also, make sure to lock the image you're building from in your Dockerfile FROM directive to a specific distro version like alpine3.15 etc. to avoid build errors with Docker, like this:

• FROM php:8.1.8RC1-fpm-alpine3.15

When you're done with the new Dockerfile, add a separate service for the new version of PHP to your docker-compose.yml, following the same pattern of other version declarations there. Then just run docker-compose down and docker-compose up --build --detach inside the server directory.

If you don't need some of the existing versions, just comment out their declaration from docker-compose.yml or remove them completely so they don't eat up memory.

This project has a default aliases template for Laravel. It's there for reference, but, in order to use your own aliases, you need to create an aliases.sh file inside the server directory, add your aliases there, and rebuild the containers via the docker-compose command, then it will import your aliases file into the PHP containers.

In order for your aliases to work, you will have to run the docker exec command with an -l flag. Example:

docker exec -it php81 sh -l

• Docker Docs
• Useful article by Michael Bladowski that shows a neat nginx configuration trick to run different PHP versions in parallel on a per-project basis with Docker.