Simple PHP project skeleton

This is not meant to be used for entreprise grade projects or production.

This is a simple PHP project base Docker Compose stack, including:

• configured PostgreSQL,
• configured PHP with Opcache,
• configured Nginx,
• dev variant with Xdebug working with no additional configuration,
• suitable for Drupal, Symfony, and any other PHP project.

Nginx, PHP and PostgreSQL are not performance tuned. It is mostly suitable for development environements or small personal hosting.

Overview

The /etc folder contains configuration for services. Almost every configuration file will be bind mounted as volume in each revelant container instance, you can modify files on your host file system and restart target containers without the need to rebuild.

Your application will live in the app/ folder, which means that it is your project root, and it must not leak outside of this folder, in short, you will find this structure for a Symfony project:

• app/composer.json,
• app/.env for Symfony specific .env file, which should not contain much since the root .env file already contains valuable configuration such as APP_ENV and DATABASE_URL,
• app/public/index.php.

The app folder is mounted inside the php container, whose UID and GID are bound to the current user identification. This allows you to continue editing files which live inside the container for development environements.

There is one exception for the PHP container which has a Dockerfile because we need to run additional PHP extensions compilation and configuration.

The ./control.sh script will allow you to manage your containers:

• ./control.sh build runs a docker compose build,
• ./control.sh pull pulls everything to the latest version,
• ./control.sh up run the project,
• ./control.sh down shutdown everything,
• ./control.sh up CONTAINER_NAME run a single container,
• ./control.sh down CONTAINER_NAME shutdown a single container.

This control script requires that you have a .env file, which contains at the very least:

• PROJECT_NAME=foo where foo is the docker compose project name,
• APP_ENV=dev|prod which derives which docker compose yaml file to use, but also will propagate this variable to PHP environment, which gives Symfony projects their own environment name.

All other variables are required too but they target containers and not the control script, they are documented inside the file.

Setup

Clone this repository, and remove the .git folder in order to add your own.

git clone https:// your_project_name
cd your_project_name
rm -rf .git
git init

Then copy the .env.dist file:

cp .env.dist .env

Then edit the .env file following the comments inside. For all the rest, files are yours, so adapt to your needs.

Then build and start:

./control.sh build
./control.sh up

You now can install your PHP application inside the app/ folder, and adapt nginx configuration to point toward your index PHP file.

If you required changes in the nginx or other configuration files, restart your containers, as well as when you change environment variables:

./control.sh restart

Per default, containers are configured for a Symfony project and require no additional configuration, tested with Symfony 6.2.

Known bugs and annoyances

As of now, there is something wrong with Xdebug temporary bind mounted volumes, Xdebug can't write inside, I have to explore why.