Basic Symfony Flex with Symfony Server Dockerized

Feb 4, 2020

Symfony Flex allows you to tailor a Symfony application to your needs by building it with “recipes”. It provides a way to create a very lean and clean Symfony application with only the bells and whistles you choose.

In this post, I’ll show you how to create a Dockerized version of your Flex application that utilizes the Symfony local server for use during local development.

Setup #

If you already have a Symfony Flex application created, you can skip this section.

composer create-project symfony/skeleton myapi

This will create a skeleton project in a directory called myapi with everything set up and ready to go in an easy to navigate structure.

Next, we install the API recipe which installs bundles such as Doctrine, CORS handling, Twig templating, validators, etc. It will give you barebones ability to easily create an API base.

composer req api

You’re now free to create any entities, repositories, controllers, services, etc. that you require, or you can come back to that at a later time, it is not required.

Dockerizing #

Docker Compose #

For this example, we’ll simply set up a MySQL server, Redis server, and PHP CLI. We will manage all this through Docker Compose.

# docker-compose.yml
version: '3'

services:
  db:
    image: mysql:5.7
    environment:
      MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: root_pwd
      MYSQL_DATABASE: api_db
      MYSQL_USER: api_user
      MYSQL_PASSWORD: api_pass
    volumes:
      - ./docker/db:/var/lib/mysql/data
    ports:
      - '3306:3306'
    restart: always
  redis:
    image: redis
    ports:
      - '6379:6379'
    volumes:
      - ./docker/redis:/data
    entrypoint: redis-server --appendonly yes
    restart: always
  web:
    build:
      context: .
    depends_on:
      - db
      - redis
    volumes:
      - ./:/var/www/html/
    ports:
      - '8080:80'
    stdin_open: true
    tty: true

The above will pull in the mysql:5.7 image with some initial environment variables (you’re free to replace them). It will mount its data volume to ./docker/db of your myapi directory for persistence. It will also map port 3306 on your host machine to forward to 3306 in the container.

Below that, we pull in the redis image and mount it’s volume to ./docker/redis of your myapi directory for storage. It will also map port 6379 of your host machine to forward to 6379 in the container. You can adjust the entrypoint to your needs.

Lastly, web will build a custom image based on a Dockerfile below. It will mount your myapi directory to /var/www/html inside the container. It will also map port 8080 of your host machine to forward to port 80 in the container.

It is also a good idea to add these volume paths to your .gitignore to avoid checking them into your repository.

Dockerfile #

# Dockerfile
FROM php:7.3-cli

# Remove restirction from installing PHP packages
RUN rm /etc/apt/preferences.d/no-debian-php

# Install required packages
RUN apt update && apt install wget php-mysql php-json php-mbstring php-xml php-curl -y

# Extension install
RUN docker-php-ext-install mysqli pdo pdo_mysql

# Install Symfony package
RUN wget https://get.symfony.com/cli/installer -O - | bash && mv /root/.symfony/bin/symfony /usr/local/bin/symfony

# Open port 80
EXPOSE 80

# Run it
CMD cd /var/www/html && symfony server:start --no-tls --port=80

The above Dockerfile will pull in the php:7.3-cli image. Since Symfony’s local server will be handling the requests, we do not need Nginx, Apache, mod_php, or php-fpm.

In the commands, we tell it to install wget which is required to install the Symfony CLI tools, and other PHP packages (by removing the APT restriction). We also open up port 80. At the end, we change our directory to /var/www/html where our myapi directory is mounted, and run the Symfony local server on port 80.

Running #

It is a good idea to now modify your .env.local file to connect to the container’s MySQL instance and Redis instance with the credentials set up in the docker-compose.yml file and the special mapping keywords, redis and db for the address.

Examples:

• DATABASE_URL=mysql://${DATABASE_USER}:${DATABASE_PASSWORD}@mysql:3306/${DATABASE_NAME}?serverVersion=5.7
• REDIS_URL=redis://redis:6379?timeout=5

Finally, executing docker-compose up will build and boot the containers. If you’re successful… you should see the Symfony local server running with a message similar to:

[OK] Web server listening on http://127.0.0.1:80

Now, if you open your browser to http://127.0.0.1:8080 (8080 is our local port which will forward to port 80 in the container), you should see the Symfony welcome screen.

As a side note, it would be a good idea to set up a hosts file entry so you don’t need to type your localhost every time, and also enabling HTTPS would be a good measure, but not necessarily needed for local development.

Conclusion #

That concludes the basic setup to Dockerize a Symfony Flex API application.

For more information on Symfony Flex, click here; or information on Symfony Server, click here.