Building containers
Lets create a Dockerfile in the project directory for our Hello World project. The Hello World application is written in the PHP programming language, so we will need an image that provides the PHP binaries. Next we also need an production grade HTTP server such as Apache to host the PHP files (The php -S command that we used earlier is good for testing, but is cannot deliver the performance and features for real world applications).
So we need the following dependencies inside our container:
PHP binaries
Apache HTTP server
We could create an Docker image from scratch, compiling, building, configuring and installing the dependencies by our self. This would be a tedious task, but is feasible. A better idea is to start 'from' an already built image that provides the dependencies.
Docker Hub
Docker Hub is a place that bundles existing Docker images, free and open for anybody to use.
Finding a PHP image
Lets search for a fitting base image to build our image upon. Let's try to search for PHP
This should give us the following results:
Many image are available that provide support for PHP inside Docker. Many of them could be used. To make it easier to determine an active and supported image, Docker Hub will provide some extra information such as 'stars' and 'pulls'. People can 'star' images that they like. This will give an indication of the popularity. 'pulls' shows the amount of times that the images has been pulled, either to create an new image, or to deploy a container that is based on that image.
Another parameter that could help deciding what image to use is the developer. The developer is the first part before the / in the full container name. For example webdevops/php-apache-dev means that the image with name php-apache-dev is made by the webdevops developer or team.
Some image don't have a developer name and / sign. These images are 'official' images. They are created and maintained by the people of docker. They provide many of the popular solutions. Many times depending on one of these images is preferable.
The best choice in our case would be the official PHP image. Lets click on it to see its details.
The PHP repository provides many variations of its images. Any variation can be chosen by using its 'tag'. This enables that you could depend on older versions, or have the cli variant for testing, or an Apache version for production.
Note that you can always leave the tag empty. In that case Docker will use the default tag called latest.
Lets choose the latest version of PHP, and we also need Apache, so the 7.2-apache tag would be useful for our application.
FROM
FROMNow that we found an image to depend on, lets add it to our Dockerfile. We can add this by using the FROM keyword followed by the name of the image, and the name of the tag we would like to start from. In our case this would result in
Now we have an Linux image with PHP and Apache installed.
COPY
COPYNext we need to copy our project files into the image. This can be done with the COPY keyword. The copy keyword accepts two arguments. The source of the files on our computer, and the destination in the Docker image.
Apache is by default configured to host files that are stored inside the /var/www/html directory. So we will need to copy the files from our project to that directory. This can be done with the following command.
Note that the . (dot) represents the current directory. So all files and folder that are in the same directory as the Dockerfile will be copied.
EXPOSE
EXPOSEThe goal of docker is to isolate software as much as possible. This means that TCP/IP traffic is unable to get in or out of the container. This can be solved by EXPOSEing a TCP or UDP port. This will open up the port on the container, making communication with the outside world and vice versa possible.
Apache runs on port 80 to serve HTTP. This means that we need to open up this port in the container. This can be done with the following command:
Dockerfile
This should be enough to run the Hello World application into a Docker container. The Dockerfileshould look like this:
Building the image
The Dockerfile only describes how an image is created. The next step is to build the image. Building the image will execute the commands in the Dockerfile. Building the image needs to be done with the docker build command in the terminal.
The docker build command needs some extra information to be able to build the image correctly.
The first argument is a tag. This can be provided with the -t or --tag attribute followed by the name of the tag. Lets tag our image with the name hello-world. The last attribute should be the directory where the Dockerfile is located. In our case this is the current directory and can be notated with a . (dot).
Many more attributes can be used. They are described in the Docker documentation.
Ok, lets run this command now. The result should look like this:
First we can see that Docker will download (pull) the php:7.2-apache image from the internet. Next it will execute the commands provided in the Dockerfile. The result is a new images called hello-world.
The hello-world image
hello-world imageYou can list the installed images using the following command:
This command will list all installed images on the computer. The hello-world image should be visible in that list.
You have now created your own custom Docker image. In the next chapter we will take a look on how to run this image and get the webpage visible in a browser.
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