Running a PHP Web App in a Docker Container

Written on August 30th, 2017 by Karl Hughes

If you’re familiar with the process for creating a simple website using PHP, then adding Docker to the mix should be relatively easy. The great thing about using Docker is that you have better portability over your code. Let’s look at a simple Docker command that will host a webpage written in PHP.

Our PHP Script

index.php

Create a file called index.php and add some HTML like this:

<!doctype html>

<html lang="en">
<head>
  <meta charset="utf-8">
  <title>My PHP Website</title>
</head>

<body>
  <h1>My PHP Website</h1>
  <p>Here is some static content.</p>
  <p><?php echo "Here is some dynamic content"; ?></p>
</body>
</html>

As you can see, there’s one single line of PHP in the script just to make sure our server is actually working.

Let’s serve that website using the official PHP Apache image:

docker run --rm -p 8000:80 -v $(pwd):/var/www/html php:apache

Docker should download the latest version of the image and start up a webpage at localhost:8000.

What’s going on with that Docker command?

Let’s break down the docker run command piece by piece:

docker run This is Docker’s command to run a command within a new container. There are a lot of options that you can pass in, but this example is pretty minimal.
--rm This tells Docker to “remove” the container after the command is completed. In this case, that means that when you exit (by pressing control + c on Mac), the container will stop and remove itself from your system.
-p 8000:80 If you’re familiar with Apache, you know that it typically serves web applications on port 80. This parameter tells Docker to map port 80 within the container to port 8000 on the host. That’s why our site is available at .
-v $(pwd):/var/www/html This is telling Docker to mount a volume. You typically pass in a path to a folder on your root directory, a colon, and then a path to the folder in the container. Volumes are a powerful tool, but for this simple example we’re just mounting the current directory from our terminal into the directory Apache serves by default.
php:apache Here we specify the image to use for PHP. As I mentioned above, this image includes the Apache webserver.

In just one line we were able to serve a PHP based website on our machine, and if we pass that same Docker command to other developers, they will be able to do the same thing without installing any new software. Unlike a traditional VM, this command takes a few seconds to get up and running, and it’s very lightweight.

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