1+n PHP versions and projects via LaraDock

I found myself in a peculiar situation — working with multiple, legacy and greenfield, PHP projects thus in need to have my local development environment supporting 7.1.x, 7.2.x and 7.4.x.

My choice for a local PHP development environment is Laradock, love this project. It does support multiple project setup but sadly, at the moment of writing, does not support multiple PHP versions. There’s an open issue from 2017 with recent (2019) updates which talks about this challenge.

This was a must-have for me.

The Process

• Clone LaraDock.
• Get your .env in order.
• Amend docker-compose.yml to introduce new php-fpm services.
• Configure NGINX sites to use different php-fpm services.
• PHP extensions and Composer.

Let’s discuss every step in more details.

Clone Laradock

The setup was done and tested with v9.5 tag.

If you are running LaraDock from a master branch, or later on, decide to update to a newer tag, make sure to stash local docker-compose.yml changes before you pull, and pop afterwards.

$ git clone git@github.com:laradock/laradock.git
$ cd laradock
$ git checkout v9.5

Get your .env in order

By default .env is well configured and whit out any change can cover the majority of web projects. If change is needed it’s usually project-specific.

My common tweaks are:

• PHP version
• MySQL version
• Node version
• Enable Python

Do explore the .env file and various configuration flags. I bet (if you aren’t familiar with LaraDock) you’ll be amazed how much this single, Docker-based development environment can cover for you.

Amend docker-compose.yml

The goal is to introduce 1+n php-fpm services which run different versions of PHP.

By default, you get one php-fpm service where PHP version is controlled with PHP_VERSION flag in the .env file.

This is your “master” php-fpm service and should run the newest PHP version, the same version applies to PHP CLI inside workspace container. At the moment…