phpfarm for docker

This is a build file to create a phpfarm setup. The resulting docker image will run Apache on different ports with different PHP versions accessed via FCGI. The different PHP CLI binaries are accessible as well.

There are two tags for this image: wheezy and jessie, referring to the underlying Debian base system releases. Unless you need PHP 5.1 or 5.2 you should always use the jessie tag.

The wheezy image is deprecated and may not run on modern Linux kernels anymore! Booting your host system with vsyscall=emulate kernel parameter may help if you really need it.

The nightly build refers to the current master when the image was built. You probably want to rebuild the image yourself if you need to test against a very recent snapshot. See next section on how to do that.

Building the image

After cloning the git repository, simply run the following command:

docker build -t splitbrain/phpfarm:jessie -f Dockerfile-Jessie .
docker build -t splitbrain/phpfarm:wheezy -f Dockerfile-Wheezy .

This will setup a Debian base system, install phpfarm, download and compile the different PHP versions, extensions and setup Apache. So, yes this will take a while. See the next section for a faster alternative.

On Kernel 4.19 there seems to be a bug. You need to disable the metacopy feature of the overlay filesystem to build the image. echo N > /sys/module/overlay/parameters/metacopy

Downloading the image

Simply downloading the ready made image from Docker Hub is probably the fastest way. Just run one of these:

docker pull splitbrain/phpfarm:jessie
docker pull splitbrain/phpfarm:wheezy

Running the container

The following will run the container and map all ports to their respective ports on the local machine. The current working directory ($PWD) will be used as the document root for the Apache server and the server itself will run with the same user id as your current user ($UID).

docker run --rm -t -i -e APACHE_UID=$UID -v $PWD:/var/www:rw \
  -p 8051:8051 -p 8052:8052 -p 8053:8053 -p 8054:8054 -p 8055:8055 \
  -p 8056:8056 -p 8070:8070 -p 8071:8071 -p 8072:8072 -p 8073:8073 \
  -p 8074:8074 -p 8080:8080 \
  splitbrain/phpfarm:jessie

You can access the Apache/PHP via localhost. Eg. http://localhost:8073 for the PHP 7.3 version. The nightly build is available on port 8000.

Above command will also remove the container again when the process is aborted with CTRL-C (thanks to the --rm option). While running, the Apache and PHP error log is shown on STDOUT.

An alternative is to not isolate the container's network at all from the local machine. This makes it possible for the container to access all the services you're running locally, eg. a database. It will also automatically make all the exposed ports available locally (but you can't remap them, so they need to be available, eg. not used by anything else). To do so use the --network host switch:

docker run --rm -t -i -e APACHE_UID=$UID -v $PWD:/var/www:rw \
   --network host splitbrain/phpfarm:jessie

You can also access the PHP binaries within the container directly. Refer to the table above for the correct names. The following command will run PHP 5.3 on your current working directory.

docker run --rm -t -i -v $PWD:/var/www:rw splitbrain/phpfarm:jessie php-5.3 --version

Alternatively you can also run an interactive shell inside the container with your current working directory mounted.

docker run --rm -t -i -v $PWD:/var/www:rw splitbrain/phpfarm:jessie /bin/bash

Loading custom php.ini settings

All PHP versions are compiled with the config-file-scan-dir pointing to /var/www/.php/. When mounting your own project as a volume to /var/www/ you can easily place custom .ini files in your project's .php/ directory and they should be automatically be picked up by PHP.

XDebug debugging, profiling and tracing

XDebug is enabled in all of the PHP versions. It is preconfigured for immeadiate use.

Profiling and tracing can be triggered through the XDEBUG_PROFILE and XDEBUG_TRACE Post/Get/Ccookie setting - no special trigger value has been set, so any value will trigger. Output files are placed into the volume you mounted to /var/www/ with an xdebug. prefix.

Remote debugging is triggered through the XDEBUG_SESSION cookie. It uses the remote_connect_back setting, so it expects a debugger on port 9000 (the default) on the IP that requested the page.

Of course you can always reconfigure xdebug through a custom ini file as described above.

Using the image for Testing in Gitlab-CI

Gitlab-CI users can use this image to automate testing against different PHP versions. For detailed info refer to the gitlab-ci documentation.

Here's a simple .gitlab-ci.yml example using phpunit.

stages:
  - test

image: splitbrain/phpfarm:jessie

php-5.3:
  stage: test
  script:
    - wget https://phar.phpunit.de/phpunit-old.phar -O phpunit
    - php-5.3 phpunit --coverage-text --colors=never

php-5.4:
  stage: test
  script:
    - wget https://phar.phpunit.de/phpunit-old.phar -O phpunit
    - php-5.4 phpunit --coverage-text --colors=never

php-5.6:
  stage: test
  script:
    - wget https://phar.phpunit.de/phpunit.phar -O phpunit
    - php-5.6 phpunit --coverage-text --colors=never

php-7.0:
  stage: test
  script:
    - wget https://phar.phpunit.de/phpunit.phar -O phpunit
    - php-7.0 phpunit --coverage-text --colors=never

Supported PHP extensions

Here's a list of the extensions available in each of the PHP versions available in the Jessie image. It should cover all the default extensions plus a few popular ones and xdebug for debugging.