docker-cakephp

Dockerfile for deploying your CakePHP application in a Docker container, able to connect to a remote database with database-based sessions and inject ENV vars to configure your application.

Based on Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial and PHP 7.0

Note: This project is meant to be an example to study the basics and essentials of CakePHP in a Docker environment, therefore it is build on an Ubuntu base image rather then a PHP base image, uses a 'simple' webserver like Apache and has some non-efficient commands to demonstrate stuff.

Usage

You can edit the Dockerfile to add your own git, composer or custom commands to add your application code to the image.

To create the image myvendor/mycakephpapp, execute the following command on the docker-cakephp directory:

docker build -t myvendor/mycakephpapp .

Optional: You can now push your new image to a registry:

docker push myvendor/mycakephpapp

Running your CakePHP docker image

Start your image forwarding container port 80 to localhost port 80:

docker run -d -p 80:80 myvendor/mycakephpapp

Example: Connecting to a MySQL container

Start a MySQL container

docker run -d \
	--name mysql-server \
	-e MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=sekret \
	-e MYSQL_DATABASE=cakephp \
	mysql:5.7

Start your image and:

• Link it to the MySQL container you just started (so your container can contact it)
• Connect to a remote database server using the CakePHP DATABASE_URL env variable filled with the variables given in the command above.
• Use the database session handler using our the SESSION_DEFAULTS env variable (see Dockerfile for implementation)

docker run -d -p 80:80 \
	--name cakephp \
	-e "DATABASE_URL=mysql://root:sekret@mysql-server/cakephp?encoding=utf8&timezone=UTC&cacheMetadata=true" \
	-e "SESSION_DEFAULTS=database" \
	--link mysql-server:mysql \
	myvendor/mycakephpapp

Test your deployment

Visit http://localhost/ in your browser or

curl http://localhost/

You can now start using your CakePHP container!

Things to look out for

• Think about handling session when running multiple containers behind a loadbalancer. You could modify the Dockerfile to sed the config/app.php file to use the database or cache session handler as implemented in the example.
• If you want to store any files (e.g. uploads), please remember containers are 'stateless' and the data will be gone when you delete them. You can use volumes or an object storage with a webservice interface like Amazon S3.