Running Laravel in Docker Containers: A Complete Guide

When building modern applications, containers simplify development by ensuring consistency across environments. With Docker, you can containerize your Laravel project, making setup faster, cleaner, and easier to scale.

🔹 Why Use Docker with Laravel?

• Consistency: Same environment for all developers.
• Isolation: Dependencies don’t pollute your system.
• Scalability: Run multiple services (PHP, MySQL, Redis) easily.
• Portability: Deploy anywhere Docker runs.

🔹 Step 1: Create a New Laravel Project

If you don’t have a Laravel project yet, create one:

composer create-project laravel/laravel laravel-docker
cd laravel-docker

🔹 Step 2: Create a Dockerfile

Inside the project root, create a Dockerfile:

FROM php:8.2-fpm

# Install system dependencies
RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y \
    git curl libpng-dev libonig-dev libxml2-dev zip unzip

# Install PHP extensions
RUN docker-php-ext-install pdo_mysql mbstring exif pcntl bcmath gd

# Install Composer
COPY --from=composer:2.6 /usr/bin/composer /usr/bin/composer

# Set working directory
WORKDIR /var/www

COPY . .

RUN composer install

CMD ["php-fpm"]

🔹 Step 3: Create a docker-compose.yml

This file will define your services (Laravel, Nginx, MySQL):

version: '3.8'
services:
  app:
    build:
      context: .
      dockerfile: Dockerfile
    container_name: laravel_app
    working_dir: /var/www
    volumes:
      - .:/var/www
    networks:
      - laravel

  webserver:
    image: nginx:alpine
    container_name: laravel_web
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "8080:80"
    volumes:
      - .:/var/www
      - ./nginx.conf:/etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf
    networks:
      - laravel

  db:
    image: mysql:8.0
    container_name: laravel_db
    restart: unless-stopped
    environment:
      MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: root
      MYSQL_DATABASE: laravel
      MYSQL_USER: laravel
      MYSQL_PASSWORD: secret
    ports:
      - "3306:3306"
    networks:
      - laravel

networks:
  laravel:
    driver: bridge

 🔹 Step 4: Create nginx.conf

server {
    listen 80;
    index index.php index.html;
    root /var/www/public;

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
    }

    location ~ \.php$ {
        fastcgi_pass app:9000;
        fastcgi_index index.php;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /var/www/public$fastcgi_script_name;
        include fastcgi_params;
    }
}

🔹 Step 5: Build and Run Containers

Run the following commands:

# Build and start containers
docker-compose up -d --build

# Check running containers
docker ps

# Enter Laravel container
docker exec -it laravel_app bash

# Run migrations
php artisan migrate

Now visit:
 👉 https://localhost:8080

You should see your Laravel welcome page 🎉

🔹 Step 6: Useful Docker Commands

Stop containers:

docker-compose down

 Rebuild containers: 

docker-compose up -d --build

 Access database container: 

docker exec -it laravel_db mysql -u laravel -p

✅ Conclusion

By containerizing Laravel with Docker, you gain reliability, scalability, and portability. This setup allows you to extend easily—adding Redis, queues, or Elasticsearch later.