Alpine Linux, PHP, NGINX

A super fast, super slim, production hardened PHP 7.3 and NGINX docker image built on Alpine linux.

Perfect for horizontally distributed PHP and Laravel applications run within a container cluster.

Stack

• Alpine Linux
• PHP-7.3 & PHP-FPM
  • mysqli
  • pdo, pdo_mysql + pdo_sqlite
  • opcache
  • pcntl
  • bcmath
  • exif
  • mbstring
  • gd
  • xdebug-2.9 (Not loaded)
• NGINX 1.16 (FastCGI web-server)
• Composer (PHP package manager)
  • hirak/prestissimo globally installed
• Supervisor Daemon (Process manager)
• Tooling
  • git
  • wget
  • bash

Usage

This image should not be directly built, it a starting point for your own Dockerfile.

Your Dockerfile should ADD an NGINX configuration file at the very least.

Lightweight example Dockerfile of running a brand new Laravel Application

docker build -f example/Dockerfile .

XDebug

XDebug is included with the image, but not enabled for the PHP runtime. Lazily loading the xdebug module through command-line can be done via

php -d zend_extension=xdebug ...

Logging Output

A docker container should have the command it runs output to stdout and stderr, so the container runner (e.g. docker-compose / Kubernetes) can see this output and forward it to a logging system.

PHP

PHP-FPM has workers that cam emit to php://stdout and php://stderr. These are captured by PHP-FPM's master process and can be logged to a single error log file. However, there is no way to send these to two separate files.

Additionally, a further file symlink would be needed to forward this output to /dev/stdout. But, PHP-FPM does not run as a user with the privilege to create this symlink or write to the file. Only root can write to /dev/stdout.

Possible Solutions

1. Have php workers write to a file in a known location, /var/www/storage/logs/stdout.log.
2. A process running as root tails this file and forwards it to /dev/stdout
3. Another process truncates this file occasionally to prevent it from filling up the file system