The New Media Campaigns site has posted a new tutorial today introducing PHP developers to Docker, the handy tool to create containers for your applications a bit simpler and more efficient than just something like Vagrant.

I've used Vagrant to manage local development servers for several years. Vagrant is, according to its official website, a tool to "create and configure light-weight, reproducible, and portable development environments." [...] However, Vagrant has one large downside—it implies hardware virtualization. This means each project runs atop a full virtual machine, and each virtual machine has a complete operating system that demands a large overhead in system resources.

[...] There is another solution, though. Have you heard of Docker? I first heard this word a year ago. It's all about containers, I was told. Awesome. What are containers?, I thought. I dug deeper, and I read all about containerization, process isolation, and union filesystems.

He starts with a brief introduction to what Docker is and two of the key concepts: containers and images. He then talks about how Docker is different from Vagrant, including the extensibility and lighter resource demands. Following all this he starts in on building an actual application in a container. He walks you through each step, including commands, to build the container and image that will result in the final instance running Ubuntu, MySQL, Nginx and PHP-FPM. He sets up a simple "Hello World" page and shows how to configure the Nginx server to serve it up as well as the MySQL server to cooperate with PHP and run locally.