For PHP projects run through the command line interface (CLI), you can do the following.
Create a Dockerfile in your PHP project
FROM php:5.6-cli
COPY . /usr/src/myapp
WORKDIR /usr/src/myapp
CMD [ "php", "./your-script.php" ]
Then, run the commands to build and run the Docker image:
docker build -t my-php-app .
docker run -it --rm --name my-running-app my-php-app
Run a single PHP script
For many simple, single file projects, you may find it inconvenient to write a complete Dockerfile. In such cases, you can run a PHP script by using the PHP Docker image directly:
docker run -it --rm --name my-running-script -v "$PWD":/usr/src/myapp -w /usr/src/myapp php:5.6-cli php your-script.php
With Apache
More commonly, you will probably want to run PHP in conjunction with Apache httpd. Conveniently, there's a version of the PHP container that's packaged with the Apache web server.
Create a Dockerfile in your PHP project
FROM php:5.6-apache
COPY src/ /var/www/html/
Where src/ is the directory containing all your php code. Then, run the commands to build and run the Docker image:
docker build -t my-php-app .
docker run -it --rm --name my-running-app my-php-app
We recommend that you add a custom php.ini configuration. COPY it into /usr/local/etc/php by adding one more line to the Dockerfile above and running the same commands to build and run:
FROM php:5.6-apache
COPY config/php.ini /usr/local/etc/php
COPY src/ /var/www/html/
Where src/ is the directory containing all your php code and config/ contains your php.ini file.
How to install more PHP extensions
We provide two convenient scripts named docker-php-ext-configure and docker-php-ext-install, you can use them to easily install PHP extension.
For example, if you want to have a PHP-FPM image with iconv, mcrypt and gd extensions, you can inheriting the base image that you like, and write your own Dockerfile like this:
FROM php:5.6-fpm
# Install modules
RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y \
libfreetype6-dev \
libjpeg62-turbo-dev \
libmcrypt-dev \
libpng12-dev \
&& docker-php-ext-install iconv mcrypt \
&& docker-php-ext-configure gd --with-freetype-dir=/usr/include/ --with-jpeg-dir=/usr/include/ \
&& docker-php-ext-install gd
CMD ["php-fpm"]
Remember, you must install dependencies for your extensions manually. If an extension needs custom configure arguments, you can use the docker-php-ext-configure script like this example.
Without a Dockerfile
If you don't want to include a Dockerfile in your project, it is sufficient to do the following:
docker run -it --rm --name my-apache-php-app -v "$PWD":/var/www/html php:5.6-apache