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 of writing, that’s 7.4, thus PHP_VERSION=7.4

Let’s create our “child” php-fpm container(s) with hard-coded PHP version. As previously stated I had a requirement for PHP 7.1.x, 7.2.x and 7.4.x.

In the docker-compose.yml, copy php-fpm entry and paste below original entry with the following tweaks:

### Key differences for PHP-FPM 7.2
php-fpm-7.2:
        args:
          - LARADOCK_PHP_VERSION=7.2
      volumes:
        - ./php-fpm/php7.2.ini:/usr/local/etc/php/php.ini

Alternatively, use the amended docker-compose.yml or explore the diff between tweaked and original versions to visualise what are we doing here.

• Do the same for PHP 7.1 and (if in need) other supported PHP versions.
• Make NGINX aware of the new php-fpm services viadepends_on directive.

Build and run

$ docker-compose up -d --build workspace nginx

If this is your first build, it will take time.

Confirm seeing all, including additionally configured, php-fpm services.

$ docker ps --filter "name=php" --format "{{.Names}}"
laradock_php-fpm_1
laradock_php-fpm-7.2_1
laradock_php-fpm-7.1_1

Configure NGINX sites

The only thing we need to change is thefastcgi_pass directive, everything else is a standard host setup.

# For .env PHP_VERSION
fastcgi_pass php-upstream;
# For PHP 7.2
fastcgi_pass php-fpm-7.2:9000;
# For PHP 7.1
fastcgi_pass php-fpm-7.1:9000;

For a quick test, let’s create 3 local domains in /etc/hosts

127.0.0.1 php74.local
127.0.0.1 php72.local
127.0.0.1 php71.local

Create (or copy from here) NGINX host files in ./laradock/nginx/sites/. I’ve used the provided Laravel example template as my projects were indeed Laravel projects. That being said, it does not matter as long as thefastcgi_pass directive is pointing to a valid php-fpm upstream.

As a result of using laravel.conf.example we only need to amend server_name, root and fastcgi_pass directives to get our quick-test local domains to respond.

php74.local

server_name php74.local;
root /var/www/php74.local/public;
fastcgi_pass php-upstream;

php72.local

server_name php72.local;
root /var/www/php72.local/public;
fastcgi_pass php-fpm-7.2:9000;

php71.local

server_name php71.local;
root /var/www/php71.local/public;
fastcgi_pass php-fpm-7.1:9000;

Create index.php in the root folders of all host files with a one-liner <?php phpinfo(); as, at this point, we just want to confirm the PHP version.

$ tree -I laradock
.
├── php71.local
│   └── public
│       └── index.php
├── php72.local
│   └── public
│       └── index.php
└── php74.local
    └── public
        └── index.php

Restart NGINX container for configurations to take effect.

$ docker-compose restart nginx

The Moment of Truth: visit URLs or curl and look for X-Powered-By.

$ curl -I http://php71.local
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx
Date: Fri, 07 Feb 2020 08:10:31 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Connection: keep-alive
X-Powered-By: PHP/7.1.33
$ curl -I http://php72.local
$ curl -I http://php74.local

PHP extensions and Composer

For the PHP_VERSION=7.4 you can and you should use the workspace container as it comes with Composer and all other goodies (as configured in .env file) composed.

$ docker-compose exec workspace bash
% composer …

For the hard-coded PHP 7.1.x and 7.2.x containers, you’ll need to bash inside and install Composer, enable PHP extensions from whit in.

$ docker-compose exec php-fpm-7.1 bash
% ... install composer ...
% docker-php-ext-install pcntl
% docker-php-ext-install pspell

mcrypt as a deprecated extension does not ship with docker-php-ext-install anymore, as I needed it, here’s the recipe.

$ docker-compose exec php-fpm-7.2 bash
% apt-get install libmcrypt-dev libreadline-dev -y
% pecl install mcrypt-stable
% docker-php-ext-enable mcrypt

At this point, you should have working 1+n PHP versions and projects setup powered by LaraDock. The next step is to git-clone your projects, create NGINX host files and away you go.

Good luck!