PHP - NGINX - MARIADB - MAIL

This projects provides all basic components to run PHP files on your local computer. NGINX is our webserver. It communicates with PHP using FastCGI (PHP-FPM). Our data will be stored in MariaDB. In case we want to send out any email, we have MailHog. It is our SMTP server and web UI for emails.

Requirements

This setup requires docker (version >= 3.4.0) to be installed on your system. Docker is a free software which isolates applications using container virtualization.

Note: You need to be in the root directory of this project to execute any docker compose command that is mentioned in this document.

Setup

First we need to set various ports for e.g. webserver, mailserver, a.so.

• copy .env.dist to .env
• change ports in .env according to you needs. If you have a port conflict on your system, because any of the ports is used by another application, this is the place to change it.

Docker

All necessary containers can be started with docker compose up -d --build. On the very first run, this might take a few minutes, because docker has to download images and setup and compile some tools.

Check your containers' status with docker ps or docker ps -a. It shows you if they are running and to find out about there current port bindings.

In case of failures or trouble use docker compose logs of docker compose logs -f to see logging output of the containers.

Use docker compose down to stop all containers, if you currently don't need them. This lowers CPU and memory consumption.

Usage

All services are available on your localhost, e.g. if you have set HTTP_PORT to 8080, than you can reach the webserver with http://localhost:8080/. The following paragraphs assume the default port values used in .env.dist.

PHP

There is a special folder for all your PHP files. It is the /php folder in the root of this project. Store all your PHP files in there to be able to access them with your browser (see next section). Your browser is going to talk to the web server, which will look for you PHP files. You have to use .php as a suffix to all your PHP files, so the web server knows how to execute them.

There is an example PHP script called phpinfo.php placed in this folder. If called in a browser, it will show you all kinds of information about PHP itself and its envorinment.

Web

The webserver and your PHP scripts are available by visiting http://localhost:8080/. There is an overview page to this project. It explains and references to the other parts of the project. You can access your PHP files stored in /php folder with the very same path in the URL: http://localhost:8080/php/.

Port: HTTP_PORT

Database

We are using MariaDB as our database management system. MariaDB is a fork of MySQL happened in 2009. This is important to know, because some command, folders, variable names, a.so. are still called mysql instead of mariadb. So don't get confused, when you see mysql in some places, it does refer to MariaDB.

If you want to see or operated on the database system, you can either access the database using a web UI called phpMyAdmin (see next chapter) or using a CLI client docker compose exec db mysql. You can actually see the database content and its files in the /data folder. Do not modify any of those files, otherwise the database will be corrupt and disfunction.

It is also possible to install and use a desktop client. MariaDB published a list of compatible clients. Please note, that the default MariaDB port is 3306, but we have changed this to 8306 in .env.dist.

Port: DB_PORT

phpMyAdmin

The easiest way to access, work with and manage our database management system is with phpMyAdmin using your web browser. phpMyAdmin allows you to select, insert, update and delete data. You can create and drop tables or backup and restore whole databases. It's documentation will explain all features in detail.

Port: PHPMYADMIN_PORT

Email

All emails should be caught by mailhog. We want to make sure, that we don't spam anybody by accident.

If necessary those emails can also be "released" in the UI and received by an email client.

Port: WEBMAIL_PORT

Optional

Debugging with PhpStorm

This section is optional and only applicable, if you are using PhpStorm IDE for development. Follow these brief steps to activate debugging withing your IDE.

• Required (enabled) plugins: Docker, PHP Docker
• Preferences | Languages & Frameworks | PHP
  • add docker-compose CLI interpreter
    • service: php-test or php
    • environment variables: COMPOSE_PROJECT_NAME=dhbw
    • "Connect to existing container"
  • path mappings -> /application
• Preferences | Languages & Frameworks | PHP | Servers
  • Host: docker
  • Port 80
  • Debugger: Xdebug
  • Mapping: dhbw -> /application