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!)