These images are provided as a starting point for your Docker-based Craft CMS deployments. They’re discrete, lightweight, and pre-configured to meet Craft’s requirements in production and development environments.

There are three main "types" of images provided for different types of applications; php-fpm, nginx, and cli. Each image allows the developer to select a PHP version (e.g. craftcms/nginx:7.4).

Each image and PHP version also provides a -dev variant which has Xdebug installed and is useful for local development (e.g. craftcms/php-fpm:7.4-dev). Images that do not include -dev are considered production.

Note: you are not required to use -dev images for local development, they are provided with Xdebug to make debugging easier.

The php-fpm image is provided as the base image (and is also used for the nginx image) and requires you "bring your own server".

The nginx image is used for a typical installation and includes an Nginx server configured for Craft CMS and php-fpm.

The image type cli which is used to run queues, migrations, etc. and the image does not expose ports for HTTP/S or PHP-FPM.

There are two main types of images: php-fpm for handling the web application, and cli for running queues and other Craft CLI commands.

Note: We purposely do not provide a web server image because that choice depends on your project needs. We do, however, provide examples illustrating how to use Nginx or Caddy with the php-fpm images.

This example uses a Docker multi-stage build to install composer dependencies inside a separate layer before copying them into the final image.

# use a multi-stage build for dependencies
FROM composer:1 as vendor
COPY composer.json composer.json
COPY composer.lock composer.lock
RUN composer install --ignore-platform-reqs --no-interaction --prefer-dist

FROM craftcms/php-fpm:7.4

# the user is `www-data`, so we copy the files using the user and group
COPY --chown=www-data:www-data --from=vendor /app/vendor/ /app/vendor/
COPY --chown=www-data:www-data . .

This example uses the craftcms/nginx repository and installs the mysql-client tools to enable backups from the Craft CMS control panel.

# composer dependencies
FROM composer:1 as vendor
COPY composer.json composer.json
COPY composer.lock composer.lock
RUN composer install --ignore-platform-reqs --no-interaction --prefer-dist

FROM craftcms/nginx:7.4

# switch to the root user to install mysql tools
USER root
RUN apk add --no-cache mysql-client
USER www-data

# the user is `www-data`, so we copy the files using the user and group
COPY --chown=www-data:www-data --from=vendor /app/vendor/ /app/vendor/
COPY --chown=www-data:www-data . .

The image is designed to be run by a www-data user that owns of the image’s /app directory. Running as non-root is considered a Docker best practice, especially when shipping container images to production.

Note: You can use the USER root directive to switch back to root to install any additional packages you need.

We recommend running Docker locally if you’re shipping your project to a Docker-based envrionment such as Amazon Web Services Elastic Container Services (ECS). The following Docker Compose file will setup your local environment with the following:

1. web service that will handle running PHP and Nginx
2. mysql service that will store your content
3. console service that will run the queue locally
4. redis service that will handle queue and caching

version: "3.6"
services:
  web:
    image: craftcms/nginx:7.4-dev
    volumes:
      - .:/app
    ports:
      - 8080:8080
    env_file: .env
  console:
    image: craftcms/cli:7.4-dev
    volumes:
      - .:/app
    env_file: .env
    command: ["./craft", "queue/listen"]
  mysql:
    image: mysql:8.0
    ports:
      - 3306:3306
    environment:
      MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: SuperPassword123456!
      MYSQL_DATABASE: dev_craftcms
      MYSQL_USER: craftcms
      MYSQL_PASSWORD: SecretPassword
    volumes:
      - db_data:/var/lib/mysql
  redis:
    image: redis:5-alpine
    ports:
      - 6379:6379
volumes:
  db_data:

This image is based off the official Docker PHP FPM image (Alpine Linux). Therefore you can use all of the tools to install PHP extensions. To install an extension, you have to switch to the root user. This example switches to the root user to install the sockets extension for PHP 7.4. Note that it switches back to www-data after installation:

FROM craftcms/php-fpm:7.4

# switch to the root user
USER root
RUN docker-php-ext-install sockets
USER www-data

# the user is www-data, so we copy the files using the user and group
COPY --chown=www-data:www-data --from=vendor /app/vendor/ /app/vendor/
COPY --chown=www-data:www-data . .

Some PHP settings may be customized by setting environment variables for the php-fpm or cli images.

In this example, we’re setting the PHP memory limit to 512M rather than the default 256M:

version: "3.6"
services:
  php-fpm:
    image: craftcms/php-fpm:7.4-dev
    volumes:
      - .:/app
    env_file: .env
    environment:
      PHP_MEMORY_LIMIT: 512M
  # ...