Joeri Verdeyen has posted a tutorial showing you how to use a combination of CoreOS and Docker as a PHP development environment. This is an alternative to the more frequently used Vagrant VM provisioning popular among developers.

I’ve been using the Vagrant provisioned-with-Ansible-setup for a while now. But for the last month(s) I’ve been playing around with things like: Docker, boot2docker, CoreOS, etcd, .. I managed to setup a fast and easy way to develop my PHP applications. Symfony2 is my preferred weapon of choice, so I’ll explain how I’m developing a Symfony2 app.

He starts with the software you'll need installed to get his example up and running, all installable via "brew". He shows how to configure the CoreOS via Vagrant and bring the box up. He then sets up the Docker client to point to the newly created VM as its server. He then creates a docker-compose.yml file to set up the necessary services including nginx, MySQL and (of course) PHP. He then shows the command to run the container, execute the configuration and ensure that all containers are configured correctly. Finally he runs the Composer installation command (Symfony2, remember) and clear the cache.