In a tutorial posted to his Medium.com site Dragos Holban continues his series walking you through Symfony for PHP applications. In this latest part of the series he shows you how to use Docker to set up an environment for a Symfony-based application.

As you probably know, I am a big Symfony fan :) In the last few years I used Vagrant to set up my Symfony development environment more or less as described here. But we now have Docker and it’s time to move forward with a new setup. Docker containers are generally more lightweight than Vagrant virtual machines, so starting and stopping them is extremely fast. They also take a lot less disk space.

He starts by sharing an example Dockerfile and docker-compose.yml to help set up and configure the environment to be ready for use. The configuration sets up Apache, PHP 7, MySQL, git, Composer and several PHP extensions. It then installs a fresh instance of Symfony and runs a bash file to finish the setup. He shares the contents of this file and the VirtualHost configuration for the web server. Finally he shows how to run the setup via the Docker command line tool and what you can expect to see when things are running smoothly.

Stefan Koopmanschap has written up a tutorial on his site introducing the use of Docker and Sculpin to create an easily reproducible and manageable blogging setup.

I've been running this blog on Sculpin for quite a while now, and I'm quite happy with how that works. We've been in a process of migrating some of our websites off a standard VPS towards a setup with Docker, Gitlab CI and Rancher. I've now migrated some websites, which is relatively easy, but most of those sites were dynamic PHP websites. Migrating a site that generates static HTML and running that is a slightly different thing. Here's how I ended up doing it.

First he covers his old setup - essentially the manual run of a shell command to generate the latest version of a the static Sculpin site. He decided to update the process and help makes things more automatic using Docker and a Gitlab pipeline flow. He then documents his attempts and configuration options as he built up the Docker configuration he wanted. This ultimately resulted in a Docker setup that installed PHP and Nginx to serve up the site, Composer to load in the required dependencies (like Sculpin) and the commands to "deploy" the latest version of the site publicly.