On the Dutch Web Alliance site there's a recent post from Michael Rook introducing you to using Docker with PHP. Docker is a configurable system allowing you to script the creation and setup of an environment, piecing software and components together in an easy, reproducible way.

Docker is currently one of the hottest technologies around, because it solves a very specific problem: the ability to easily package and deploy a (self contained) application, without the overhead of traditional virtualization solutions. In this post you’ll learn how to build, run and host Docker containers, integrate with other containers, and see how Vagrant interacts with Docker.

The post walks you through the steps you'll need to get an instance up and running with PHP setup and configured:

• Installing Docker
• Creating and starting a container
• Dependencies: linking containers
• Using Docker & Vagrant

In the end, you'll have a virtual instance and environment with PHP installed. All commands and configuration/code needed is included in the post.