1. About
2. Installation
3. Setup
4. Using Containers
5. Using Selenium
6. Further Info

Docker for Laravel gives you everything you need to get started developing your Laravel application without the need for Homestead or any other Virtual Machines on your local machine.

To use this package, all you will need to have is Docker installed with Docker Compose (which requires a separate install for Linux systems).

There are 4 main containers:

The PHP container includes:

• PHP 7.1
• Composer
• Node & NPM (including Yarn, Bower, Grunt & Gulp)
• Git
• Chrome & Chrome Driver (for headless browser support)

Download or clone the repository to your required location:

git clone https://github.com/SwipeAndTap/laravel-docker.git

Place your Laravel project within the code folder which will be automatically linked to the var/www directory on the php service container.

Once this is done, all changes made to the files in this directory will be immediately reflected on the server.

1. Copy the .env.mysql.example file and create a version with the name .env.mysql. Edit the following 3 fields to match your Laravel .env database configuration:

• MYSQL_DATABASE : name of the database to be created
• MYSQL_USER : name of the user with access to the database
• MYSQL_PASSWORD : password of the user with access to the database

2. Update your Laravel .env file in the code directory to make sure that the host is changed to DB_HOST=mysql

IF USING GITHUB YOU SHOULD NEVER COMMIT YOUR ENVIRONMENT FILES. THE .env.mysql FILE WILL BE IGNORED BY DEFAULT

To start the containers, make sure that you are in the same location as the docker-compose.yml file and then run:

docker-compose up

Stop the containers by pressing ctrl + c

If you would like to run the containers in the background, you can instead run:

docker-compose up -d

To stop background containers, from the same directory run:

docker-compose down

The MySQL container caches data so that it isn't erased each time you recreate it.
This can be viewed in /storage/mysql and manually deleted if needed.

The site can be viewed from localhost:8888.

If the port is already in use by another service then this can be changed in the docker-compose.yml file under under services > web > ports

You can move into the php container by running:

docker-compose exec php bash

From here you can then perform the usual server commands such as artisan, composer, git and others.

The PHP container comes with Chrome and Chrome Driver installed so that the Selenium container can be used to run Javascript tests within a headless browser.

One of the main tools that is used in this way is Behat which works very well with Laravel for BDD tests.

You can set the required variables in your behat.yml file by making sure that the correct hosts are used in the following places:

• base_url: "http://web"
• wd_host: "http://browser:4444/wd/hub"

Take a look at the Behat documentation for more details on how to set up your environment correctly

To see all mentioned commands in more detail I would recommend looking at the Docker Docs for any troubleshooting as well as some other tips and tricks to get you working smoothly with Docker.