I am trying to understand the general process that goes into deploying a PHP web app through Docker. I have a web app developed in LAMP.
So far I understood that firs of all I have to download and install Docker itself. Afterwards I have to install the Docker Composer. Then using the Composer I have to create a container that will contain the image of my server (Apache).
And this is where I get confused. Do I have to then create a container for my database and another one for the application itself (the directory containing the code) or do I have one container for the server the database and the app?
I dont need a detailed explanation, just the general idea behind the process then I can figure out the rest on my own
Thank you to anyone who can provide any help.
There can be many ways but the simple way is to install docker on some linux machine , write a docker file that installs and configures all the necessay components such as apache , php , mysql etc , and then grab your application code either inside the container or attach it as external volume from the host.
After writing dockerfile , you can build the docker image by using the docker build command , and after the image is build you can use it locally or push to dockerhub , or push it to your private docker registery if you want.
The other option is if you just want to test , you can pull an already existing image from dockerhub that contains the LAMP stack and you then just need to do docker run on the image attaching your php application as external volume.
Ofcourse , to access the application on port 80 or 443 outside docker you have to expose those ports either in docker file , or at docker run command time.
For a test environment , you can run all the services in just one container.
For larger Deployements you can consider a container orchestration service such as DockerSwarm or Kubernetes . You can also try DC/OS from MesoSphere , by grabbing a vagrant file from thier github repo that will setup the DC/OS on a single machine for you. Then you can just spin up as many services as you want on Mesos. They provide out of the box support for service installation , container management and scaling.
The best practices recommends to have one Docker container per process/service (one container for Apache + PHP, another container for MySQL and so on) but it's just a guideline and it doesn't mean that you cannot have only one container with everything you need inside it.
If you decide to go with only one container to run all the services, you'll be fine just using Docker (Engine). You can still use Docker Compose in this case but there's no real need for it.
Docker Compose is more helpful when you have to run multiple containers. With just one command you can get all your containers up and running. Also here you can use only Docker Engine but you'll need to run each container manually.
Related
I have an AngularJS/PHP7/MySQL application and I want improve its architecture. Actually, it currently runs in separate docker containers.
One container for both the front end and back end created with Angular JS and PHP respectively.
One container for the database
I want to improve this setup and achieve something like this:
One container with NGINX : port 80, 443
One container with node and my AngularJS front : port 4200
One container apache (or php fpm ?) with my backend PHP : port 81
One container with MySQL : port 3306
And more broadly, is it a good thing to separate front and back ? For scaling problems later? And what kind of tools, I will use for these scaling problems? Docker Swarm, Kubernetes?
I don't know if it's a good approach. Could you help me to choose the right path for this application ? (Sorry for my English, I'm not native). Thanks!
I think you need to start looking into Docker Compose Basics first rather than trying to straightly dive into the deployment. This will help you to understand how to deploy multi container applications and the basic idea behind it. As per your scenario docker-compose allows you to define your NGINX container, Angular JS container (your front end), PHP (your back end) and your MySQL DB container, the ports which they are running on and also define overlay networks which you can separate container wise. Please see below resources, in the 3rd link you can also visit a Docker Compose file which has defined exactly the same configurations as your current setup, just refer it after you get hang out of the basics.
Docker Compose Official Documentation
How to use Docker Compose
Sample Docker Compose File
When it comes into Docker Swarm and Kubernetes those are container orchestration platforms. Both of these allow you to run containers in clusters which means you can replicate the number of containers running each service (service here means one of your containers, i.e NGINX Container) to make them highly available. Imagine one of your NGINX containers fails and you have defined to run 3 NGINX containers on your Docker Swarm or Kubernetes cluster and your users won't be affected though one of your NGINX container is down as there are two more other containers running. There are some differences between Docker Swarm and Kubernetes and its up to you to decide on what tool to use after you get these basics right. If you are starting out with docker-compose going into Docker-Swarm will be bit easy.
Difference between Docker Swarm and Kubernetes
Also I have added an answer explaining the use of Docker Swarm on to scenario like yours, read it so you can get an idea on how to deploy your app with Docker Swarm.
My Answer on Docker Swarm Use case
Right now we have a website running on php 5.6 at Azure on a CentOS 7 based operating system.
Every time if we want to do a new code deploy we have to do it using ftp to our server and manually transfer files and folders. This is very error prone and takes us hours of deploying and debugging afterwards every single time.
we develop on our localhost Windows machine using PHP with WAMP. So there's already a discrepancy between our localhost environments and the production environment.
I started reading a lot about docker lately and how it integrates with BitBucket pipelines. So I wanted to make our deployment Flow more streamlined and automatic with BitBucket pipelines.
Before I get to the technical stuff I have already tried, I want to make sure that I have the general picture of steps that need to be done correct.
What I want to achieve is a way for me and my colleague to write our code and push it to our BitBucket repository, from there on the pipeline picks it up, creates a docker container and deploys it (automatically) (is this a good idea, what about active users during a new container deploy?) to our website.
These are the steps I think that need to be done, please correct me where I am wrong:
1) I create a CentOS virtual machine using VirtualBox
on this VM I install docker
I create a dockerfile here where I use the php7.3-apache base image and I will install mysql on top of it as well.
?? Do I need to do extra stuff here like copying of folders with code or is
that done by bitbucket??
Now the problem I encounter is whilst creating this "docker container" for my situation. I realize this is probably a very common use case for Docker, but I've read through thousand of tutorials and watches tons of videos, but I cannot find answers to my most basic questions and I end up being stuck and frustrated for days/weeks.
I've got a fully working website created in CodeIgniter, but for the sake of the question I just want to have a working version of the docker container containing PHP MySQL and Apache.
I've logged into the CentOS VM and performed the following commands:
mkdir dockertest
touch index.html (and i placed some text in here)
touch index.php (and i placed a basic echo "hello world" in here)
touch docker-compose.yml
mkdir .docker
cd .docker
touch Dockerfile
touch vhost.conf
Dockerfile looks like this:
FROM php:7.3.0-apache-stretch
MAINTAINER Dennis
COPY . /srv/app
COPY .docker/vhost.conf /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf
RUN chown -R www-data:www-data /srv/app && a2enmod rewrite
Then I'm able to build the image using
docker build --file .docker/Dockerfile -t docker-test .
Right now I can run the container with the following command:
docker run --rm -p 8080:80 docker-test
At this point I go to my CentOS VM and I try to do a curl localhost:8080 and I get the following HTML:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
<html><head>
<title>403 Forbidden</title>
</head><body>
<h1>Forbidden</h1>
<p>You don't have permission to access on this server. <br />
</p>
<hr>
<address>Apache/2.4.25 (Debian) Server at localhost Port 8080</address>
</body></html>
So I guess this means that the Apache server is running, but it does not see my index files anywhere.
I am massively overwhelmed by the amount of documentation and tutorials that are available for Docker, but they all seem to be too high level for me or none which targets CentOS 7, PHP, MySQL and Apache combined.
A question that's also bugging me: The advantage of Docker is that it can be deployed to anywhere and the environment is the exact same. This causes no problems like "it works on my localhost". But how does this exactly work, do me and my colleague need to develop our code INSIDE the docker container? How does this even work?
The process should be:
develop: you and your colleages develop code, they push that to a version control system (git on bitbucket/github) -> the code is in one trusted repository
build: you take this code and create a (or multiple) Docker image(s) with it: on the Apache server, you need the HTML, Javascript code. Build a Docker image starting from Apache image, which then has a step to PULL the code from the git repository inside the container. That's your front end server.
For the DB part, you probably want another container, or even use a managed service that handles the migrations/updates for you, so you only need to worry about the data in the database. If you want to have you own container, make sure the data is in a VOLUME that is mounted in the container, but is otherwise stored on a local or network drive, (i.e. NOT inside the container which would get destroyed on any update)
deploy: pull the images from registry of choice, and make sure the containers are connected as needed (i.e. either on the same host and linked, or on different nodes that have access to each other through a private network)
Notes:
Use Docker for Windows rather than virtual machine and installing Docker inside it.
The host doesn't matter, it's the base image in the container that matters whether you deploy on a Ubuntu, CentOS or CoreOS host, the Docker base image is what matters for you to install dependencies and make your code run.
On the build phase, you probably don't want to pull from git inside the image if your project is a private repository, because you would need to have credentials inside the image to do that: rather you either pull the code from git outside the image, and ADD it to the image, or use another (private) container that has the git pull credentials to pull the code, do the build, and dump a build file that you can then ADD to a shippable container.
I'm trying to build a couple of Docker images for different PHP-based web apps, and for now I've been deploying them to Elastic Beanstalk using the Sample Application provided by AWS as a template. This application contains two Docker container definitions: one for PHP itself, and the other for Nginx (to act as a reverse-proxy).
However, it seems a little odd to me that the source code for my PHP application is effectively deployed outside of the Docker image. As you can see from the Github sample project linked above, there's a folder called php-app which contains all the PHP source files, but these aren't part of the container definitions. The two containers are just the stock images from Dockerhub. So in order to deploy this, it's not sufficient to merely upload the Dockerrun.aws.json file by itself; you need to ZIP this file together with the PHP source files in order for things to run. As I see it, it can (roughly) be represented by this visual tree:
*
|
|\
| - PHP Docker Container
|\
| - Linked Nginx Container
\
- Volume that Beanstalk auto-magically creates alongside these containers
Since the model here involves using two Docker images, plus a volume/file system independent of those Docker images, I'm not sure how that works. In my head I keep thinking that it would be better/easier to roll my PHP source files and PHP into one common Docker container, instead of doing whatever magic that Beanstalk is doing to tie everything together.
And I know that Elastic Beanstalk is really only acting as a facade for ECS in this case, where Task definitions and the like are being created. I have very limited knowledge of ECS but I'd like to keep my options open, in case I wanted to manually create an ECS task (using Fargate, for instance), instead of relying on Beanstalk to do it for me. And I'm worried that Beanstalk is doing something magical with that volume that would make things difficult to manually write a Task definition, if I wanted to go down that route.
What is the best practice for packaging PHP applications in a Docker environment, when the reverse proxy (be it Nginx or Apache or whatever) is in a separate container? Can anyone provide a better explanation (or correct any misunderstandings) of how this works? And how would I do the equivalent of what Beanstalk is doing here, in ECS, for a PHP application?
You have several options to build it.
The easiest is to have one service ecs with two container foreach web app (one container for php app and one container for nginx).
The only exposed port in each service is nginx 80 port with ecs dynamic port.
Each exposed service should have an alb that redirect trafic to nginx port.
In this case nginx is not used as loadbalancer, only for front web server.
Edit:
Your DockerFile for php app should be like that:
...
# Add Project files.
COPY . /home/usr/src
...
And for dev mode your docker-compose:
version: '3.0'
services:
php:
build:.
depends_on:
...
environment:
...
ports:
...
tty: true
working_dir: /home/usr/src
volumes:
- .:/home/usr/src
Then in local use docker-compose and live edit your files in container.
And in production mode file was copied in container at build time.
Is it more clear?
I have a web based application using Zend framework running on LAMPP server and MYSQL which I would like to Dockerize. Essentially, I would like to do the following:
Create a docker file that would be my docker container for the web application
Be able to pass in a configuration to this docker file so that I can build the docker image either for my local code base or pull from master branch
Any suggestions on how do I get started?
As a general best practice you should only have one service - daemon - in each container. So in your case, when you have apache and mysql, you should think about two containers. For running them at the same time you can either put together a simple bash script, or have a look at docker-compose.
The Dockerfile for the apache container would either have a volume mapped to your "live" code on your disk, or it would contain the code inside. To do the former, you would use the VOLUME declaration in the Dockerfile, and then "-v" parameter when running it (or "volumes" declaration in docker-compose.yml). To do the latter, you would use the ADD instruction in Dockerfile.
Now if you want some kind of switch between these two, I would suggest creating three Dockerfiles, such as Dockerfile.parent, Dockerfile.app, Dockerfile.live - where:
the parent contains all your dependencies
the other two use "FROM parent"
app uses the ADD instruction and therefore contains the code inside
live uses the volume
Imagine that i had created service for uploading kittens pictures and use Docker container on production.
To do it I created Docker image with PHP 5.5 service, mounted "upload" folder of my app from real OS and also mounted folder with source code.
After some time I decided to improve my app, changed source code and now it requires different env from existed in Docker.
For example, now I need PHP 5.6 instead of PHP 5.5
So when I want to change source code of my app, I can do it by switching mounted source code folder with symlinks (or cannot, because Docker will keep socket? If so, how to switch source code? Should I do it right in container without mounting?).
But how can I quickly switch Docker container after switching source code?
Fastest way would be to exec a shell session in the container, update the environment, restart the php service. As you have mounted the source code, no need to switch.
Best way would be to create a docker image with required environment and stop previous container then run the new image mounting appropriate directories.