How to Migrate Your Laravel Web Application to a Docker Environment

Introduction

As web applications grow, managing dependencies, configurations, and environments becomes increasingly complex. Docker simplifies this process by containerizing your Laravel application, ensuring seamless consistency across development, testing, and production environments.
In this guide, we’ll explore how to migrate your Laravel application to a Docker-based environment, leveraging containerization for enhanced scalability, portability, and efficient DevOps practices.

Why Use Docker for Laravel?

Migrating Laravel to Docker provides numerous benefits:

Whether you’re a Laravel developer exploring microservices or looking for a streamlined web development workflow, this Laravel tutorial will help you harness the power of Docker effectively.

Step 1: Install Docker and Docker Compose. Ensure you have Docker and Docker Compose installed on your system.

• Download Docker
• Install Docker Compose

Verify installation:

docker -v
docker-compose -v

Step 2: Create a Dockerfile for Laravel. Create a Dockerfile in the root directory of your Laravel project:

FROM php:8.1-fpm
RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y \
libpng-dev \
zip unzip \
git \
curl \
&& docker-php-ext-install pdo_mysql gd
COPY. /var/www
WORKDIR /var/www
RUN composer install –no-dev –optimize-autoloader
CMD [“php-fpm”]
EXPOSE 9000

Step 3: Create a Docker Compose File Create a docker-compose.yml file to define your Laravel, MySQL, and Nginx services:

version: ‘3.8’
services:
app:
build: .
container_name: laravel_app
restart: always
volumes:
– .:/var/www
depends_on:
– db
db:
image: mysql:8.0
container_name: laravel_db
restart: always
environment:
MYSQL_DATABASE: laravel
MYSQL_USER: laravel_user
MYSQL_PASSWORD: secret
MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: secret
ports:
– “3306:3306”
nginx:
image: nginx: alpine
container_name: laravel_nginx
restart: always
volumes:
– .:/var/www
– ./nginx/default.conf:/etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf
ports:
– “80:80”
depends_on:
– app

Step 4: Configure Nginx Create an nginx/default.conf file:

server {
listen 80;
index index.php index.html;
root /var/www/public;
location / {
try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
}
location ~ \.php$ {
include fastcgi_params;
fastcgi_pass app:9000;
fastcgi_index index.php;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
}
}

Step 5: Start Your Docker Containers Run the following command to start your Laravel application inside Docker:

docker-compose up -d

This will build and start the necessary containers.

Step 6: Run Laravel Migrations After the containers are up, run the migrations to set up the database:

docker exec -it laravel_app php artisan migrate

Step 7: Access Your Laravel Application

Open your browser and navigate to http://localhost to view your Laravel application running inside Docker.

Best Practices for Running Laravel on Docker

• Use Docker volumes for persistent data storage.
• Implement .env file management to securely store credentials.
• Utilize multi-stage builds for optimized and lightweight production images.
• Monitor containers with tools like Docker logs and Portainer for better performance and debugging.