How to build a clean Docker Symfony 5.2 PHP8 PostgreSQL Nginx project

Hey there today we gonna build a boilerplate project using Docker for symfony 5.2 with PHP8, PostgreSQL database engine and nginx as reverse-proxy.

Getting Started

First you need Docker and docker-compose, i am gonna use those versions:

$ docker -v && docker-compose -v
Docker version 19.03.8, build afacb8b7f0
docker-compose version 1.27.4, build 40524192

PosgreSQL

Using docker-compose setup PostgreSQL is very easy we gonna use version 12 from postgres:12 Docker image.

./docker/docker-compose.yml

version: '3.8'

services:
  db:
    container_name: db
    image: postgres:12
    restart: always
    environment:
        POSTGRES_PASSWORD: password
        POSTGRES_DB: testdb
    ports:
        - 15432:5432

And that's it, nothing more, here we just ensure the container will always restart and forward 15432 container port to 5432 local port.

PHP8

We gonna u_se and setup the "php:8.0-fpm" Docker image and setup the PostegreSQL PDO driver.

./docker/php-fpm/Dockerfile

FROM php:8.0-fpm

COPY wait-for-it.sh /usr/bin/wait-for-it

RUN chmod +x /usr/bin/wait-for-it

RUN apt-get update && \
    apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends libssl-dev zlib1g-dev curl git unzip netcat libxml2-dev libpq-dev libzip-dev && \
    pecl install apcu && \
    docker-php-ext-configure pgsql -with-pgsql=/usr/local/pgsql && \
    docker-php-ext-install -j$(nproc) zip opcache intl pdo_pgsql pgsql && \
    docker-php-ext-enable apcu pdo_pgsql sodium && \
    apt-get clean && rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/* /tmp/* /var/tmp/*

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

WORKDIR /var/www

CMD composer i -o ; wait-for-it db:5432 -- bin/console doctrine:migrations:migrate ;  php-fpm 

EXPOSE 9000

Then update docker-compose to connect and add a dependency to db container and expose our ./src folder

./docker/docker-compose.yml

  php-fpm:
    container_name: php-fpm
    build:
      context: ./php-fpm
    depends_on:
      - db
    environment:
      - APP_ENV=${APP_ENV}
      - APP_SECRET=${APP_SECRET}
      - DATABASE_URL=${DATABASE_URL}
    volumes:
      - ./../src/:/var/www

Nginx

Then finally use nginx web server as reverse proxy to our php-fpm container.

./docker/nginx/Dockerfile

FROM nginx:alpine

WORKDIR /var/www

CMD ["nginx"]

EXPOSE 80 443

Add nginx configurations

./docker/nginx/Dockerfile

user  nginx;
worker_processes  4;
daemon off;

error_log  /var/log/nginx/error.log warn;
pid        /var/run/nginx.pid;


events {
    worker_connections  1024;
}


http {
    include       /etc/nginx/mime.types;
    default_type  application/octet-stream;

    access_log  /var/log/nginx/access.log;
    #access_log /dev/stdout;
    #error_log /dev/stderr;

    sendfile        on;
    #tcp_nopush     on;

    keepalive_timeout  65;

    gzip  on;

    include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf;
    include /etc/nginx/sites-available/*.conf;
}

And configure default blocks, one for our php-fpm upstream and an other for the global project respectively on ./docker/nginx/conf.d/default.conf and ./docker/nginx/sites/default.conf.

./docker/nginx/conf.d/default.conf

upstream php-upstream {
    server php-fpm:9000;
}

./docker/nginx/sites/default.conf

server {

    listen 80 default_server;
    listen [::]:80 default_server ipv6only=on;

    server_name localhost;
    root /var/www/public;
    index index.php index.html index.htm;

    location / {
         try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php$is_args$args;
    }

    location ~ \.php$ {
        try_files $uri /index.php =404;
        fastcgi_pass php-upstream;
        fastcgi_index index.php;
        fastcgi_buffers 16 16k;
        fastcgi_buffer_size 32k;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        #fixes timeouts
        fastcgi_read_timeout 600;
        include fastcgi_params;
    }

    location ~ /\.ht {
        deny all;
    }

    location /.well-known/acme-challenge/ {
        root /var/www/letsencrypt/;
        log_not_found off;
    }
}

The last step is to create a dependency on our php-fpm container in our docker-compose configuration.

./docker/docker-compose.yml

  nginx:
    container_name: nginx
    build:
      context: ./nginx
    volumes:
      - ./../src/:/var/www
      - ./nginx/nginx.conf:/etc/nginx/nginx.conf
      - ./nginx/sites/:/etc/nginx/sites-available
      - ./nginx/conf.d/:/etc/nginx/conf.d
      - ./logs:/var/log
    depends_on:
      - php-fpm
    ports:
      - "80:80"
      - "443:443"

Symfony 5

With a very few configuration we built our stack, now to setup Symfony let create a "src" project root folder and use composer.

composer create-project symfony/skeleton ./src

How to use

To use the stack simply go onto the ./docker folder and run

docker-compose up --build

To go further

Use a CI such like Github Actions or Gitlab CI to build and deploy this project.

Conclusion

With a very few configuration, we built a solid Symfony5 project stack using Docker.

Thank you for reading, you can find this tutorial source code on github: https://github.com/nicolasbonnici/docker-php8-sf5-nginx-pqsql-boilerplate

Comments

[mmarton]

Hi!

Nice article, just a few notes/questions:

1. you named the nginix config file Dockerfile
2. it was a bit misleading that you called your working directory src. At first i thought you only mapped the symfony's src folder into the php container.
3. You map the whole project with vendor and possible node_modules into 2 containers. Wouldn't it be enough just to map the public dir to the nginx?
4. what is the performance of the config above,

M

[Nicolas Bonnici]

Hey there,

Nope the actual ./docker/nginx/Dockerfile is a very simple docker container build conf from nginx:alpine image.

I totally agree with you, i should rename this folder something like symfony for instance, you can submit a pull request if you want to.

Nope actually no use of npm, and composer vendors directory his located under the folder the actual ./src folder.

These is a development stack, not optimized or production ready, but the build time is very honorable.

[Šimon Janča]

Hi, great article! Struggling with Docker for a while and looking for sources so thanks.

Now, few questions

• in docker-compose.yml the version number 3.8 tells me it's unsupported version, I'd use just integers like 3, that works
• Nginx tells me it cannot access /var/log/nginx/error.log, so I'd put something like mkdir chmod and chown into the image
• If the containers are up, so where I can access the application with browser on the host computer?
• PHP tells me; doctrine don't support postgres driver but only ..., so I changed driver to pdo_psql instead in config/packages/doctrine.yaml

This is my first time I saw anything of Symfony, quite a mess :D :)

[Nicolas Bonnici]

Hey there,

Yup this is an old post must write a "How to build a clean Docker Symfony 6.2 PHP8.1 PostgreSQL 14 Nginx project" post ;)

• Not according to docker-compose documentation docs.docker.com/compose/compose-fi...

• Storing error logs under a container is a bad practice. You need to store them outside containers like so or somewhere else like an external service

nginx:
container_name: nginx
build:
context: ./nginx
volumes:
- ./../symfony/:/var/www
- ./nginx/nginx.conf:/etc/nginx/nginx.conf
- ./nginx/sites/:/etc/nginx/sites-available
- ./nginx/conf.d/:/etc/nginx/conf.d
- ./logs:/var/log
depends_on:
- php-fpm
ports:
- "8080:80"
- "443:443"

• Good if it's working, i usually use "pdo_pgsql" no problem with it

Stay tune but the version used here are clearly outdated.

[Alexandru Chitoraga]

Link for wait-for-it: github.com/vishnubob/wait-for-it