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.