Bravery Family

Custom PHP Container

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Written by

GoldKeeperSnr

in

As part of the creation of my new lab installation I wanted to migrate WordPress from barebones Apache/FPM into a custom PHP container.

The original thought was to segretate the web server and PHP FPM from one another – but it seemed to be far to complex. I eventually found this web site:

Containerize a PHP Application

This site is talking about a generalised solution for embedding any PHP application into a container, but it turns out the approach worked fine for WordPress too.

In short, it is easier to start off with a PHP-FPM container. So I chose one from the DockerHub PHP site.

Having done that, I created a Docker file:

# Dockerfile.nginx - PHP-FPM with Nginx in a single container
FROM php:8.3-fpm-alpine

# Install Nginx
RUN apk add --no-cache nginx curl

# Install PHP extensions
RUN apk add --no-cache \
    freetype-dev \
    libjpeg-turbo-dev \
    libpng-dev \
    libzip-dev \
    icu-dev \
    postgresql-dev \
    && docker-php-ext-configure gd --with-freetype --with-jpeg \
    && docker-php-ext-install -j$(nproc) \
        gd zip intl pdo pdo_mysql pdo_pgsql opcache

# PHP-FPM configuration
COPY php-fpm.conf /usr/local/etc/php-fpm.d/www.conf
COPY php-production.ini /usr/local/etc/php/conf.d/production.ini

# Nginx configuration
COPY nginx.conf /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
COPY nginx-default.conf /etc/nginx/http.d/default.conf

# Copy application code
COPY . /var/www/html/
RUN chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html

# Startup script that runs both Nginx and PHP-FPM
COPY docker-entrypoint.sh /docker-entrypoint.sh
RUN chmod +x /docker-entrypoint.sh

EXPOSE 80

HEALTHCHECK --interval=15s --timeout=5s --retries=3 \
  CMD curl -f http://localhost/health.php || exit 1

ENTRYPOINT ["/docker-entrypoint.sh"]

This file:

  • Installs NGINX
  • Configures NGINX
  • Installs PHP modules.
  • Configures FPM
  • Installs CURL
  • Defines a CURL healthcheck
  • Mounts the application and fixes the permissions.

TODO: add actual example files.

I then just archived my installation on the old server, and transferred the directories to the Lab server. These where then mounted as volumes.

Obviously, I need to do regular checks of the image to make sure it is patched up – but WordPress is working in my custom PHP container (as you can tell by being here now!)

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