meh.dev

Development with Docker, Apache, PHP, and SSL

Edited on

This post goes through a sample project I built that shows this off using docker, apache, php, and xdebug for local development.

Want to skip straight to the complete sample project? Click here!

Project Overview

  • docker/certificates/ – gitignored folder for holding your dev certs
  • docker/web/Dockerfile – web container
  • docker/web/configs/apache/ – apache configs for example.test site
  • docker/web/configs/php/ - php configs (for xdebug with docker)
  • public/ – your application index

Configuring php:8.1-apache

The default php:8.1-apache docker image isn’t ready for development out of the box. Here’s some of the changes I recommend making.

Installing PHP Extensions

COPY --from=mlocati/php-extension-installer /usr/bin/install-php-extensions /usr/local/bin/
RUN set -eux; \
    install-php-extensions \
        xdebug \
    ;

Customizing PHP

COPY docker/web/configs/php/*.ini $PHP_INI_DIR/conf.d/

This example only includes a xdebug.ini config, but you can add additional ini files here to make other changes.

Configure Apache sites and enabling mods

COPY ./docker/web/configs/apache/sites-enabled/* /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/
RUN a2enmod ssl \
    && a2enmod allowmethods \
    && a2enmod headers \
    && a2enmod mime \
    && a2enmod rewrite

That’s the bare minimum, here’s a few more things you might want to do Install Composer

COPY --from=composer/composer:2-bin /composer /usr/bin/composer

Change the document root

ENV APACHE_DOCUMENT_ROOT /var/www/html/
RUN sed -ri -e 's!/var/www/html!${APACHE_DOCUMENT_ROOT}!g' /etc/apache2/sites-available/*.conf
RUN sed -ri -e 's!/var/www/!${APACHE_DOCUMENT_ROOT}!g' /etc/apache2/apache2.conf /etc/apache2/conf-available/*.conf

View the complete Dockerfile here.

Configuring SSL

You’ll need some self-signed certificates in order to configure SSL. I’ve used mkcert to create and trust them on my localhost. Before you proceed, install mkcert.

mkcert -install
mkcert example.test
mv example.*.pem docker/certificates/

Using xDebug

With this configuration xDebug should be ready to go. The only thing I needed to do in PHPStorm is enable listening for connections and configure the path mapping.

example.test

Conclusion

There’s only a few more things left to do.

Add an entry for the site to your hosts file

127.0.0.1 example.test

Start the containers

docker compose up

You should now be able to access and debug the public/index.php file by going to https://example.test/ in any browser on your host.