php

Estimated reading time: 11 minutes

While designed for web development, the PHP scripting language also provides general-purpose use.

GitHub repo: https://github.com/docker-library/php

Library reference

This content is imported from the official Docker Library docs, and is provided by the original uploader. You can view the Docker Store page for this image at https://store.docker.com/images/php

Supported tags and respective Dockerfile links

Quick reference

What is PHP?

PHP is a server-side scripting language designed for web development, but which can also be used as a general-purpose programming language. PHP can be added to straight HTML or it can be used with a variety of templating engines and web frameworks. PHP code is usually processed by an interpreter, which is either implemented as a native module on the web-server or as a common gateway interface (CGI).

wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP

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How to use this image.

With Command Line

For PHP projects run through the command line interface (CLI), you can do the following.

Create a Dockerfile in your PHP project

FROM php:7.0-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:7.0-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:7.0-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 -d --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:7.0-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.

Without a Dockerfile

If you don’t want to include a Dockerfile in your project, it is sufficient to do the following:

$ docker run -d -p 80:80 --name my-apache-php-app -v "$PWD":/var/www/html php:7.0-apache

How to install more PHP extensions

We provide the helper scripts docker-php-ext-configure, docker-php-ext-install, and docker-php-ext-enable to more easily install PHP extensions.

In order to keep the images smaller, PHP’s source is kept in a compressed tar file. To facilitate linking of PHP’s source with any extension, we also provide the helper script docker-php-source to easily extract the tar or delete the extracted source. Note: if you do use docker-php-source to extract the source, be sure to delete it in the same layer of the docker image.

FROM php:7.0-apache
RUN docker-php-source extract \
	# do important things \
	&& docker-php-source delete

PHP Core Extensions

For example, if you want to have a PHP-FPM image with iconv, mcrypt and gd extensions, you can inherit the base image that you like, and write your own Dockerfile like this:

FROM php:7.0-fpm
RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y \
		libfreetype6-dev \
		libjpeg62-turbo-dev \
		libmcrypt-dev \
		libpng-dev \
	&& docker-php-ext-install -j$(nproc) iconv mcrypt \
	&& docker-php-ext-configure gd --with-freetype-dir=/usr/include/ --with-jpeg-dir=/usr/include/ \
	&& docker-php-ext-install -j$(nproc) gd

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. There is no need to run docker-php-source manually in this case, since that is handled by the configure and install scripts.

PECL extensions

Some extensions are not provided with the PHP source, but are instead available through PECL. To install a PECL extension, use pecl install to download and compile it, then use docker-php-ext-enable to enable it:

FROM php:7.1-fpm
RUN pecl install redis-3.1.0 \
	&& pecl install xdebug-2.5.0 \
	&& docker-php-ext-enable redis xdebug

FROM php:5.6-fpm
RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y libmemcached-dev zlib1g-dev \
	&& pecl install memcached-2.2.0 \
	&& docker-php-ext-enable memcached

Other extensions

Some extensions are not provided via either Core or PECL; these can be installed too, although the process is less automated:

FROM php:5.6-apache
RUN curl -fsSL 'https://xcache.lighttpd.net/pub/Releases/3.2.0/xcache-3.2.0.tar.gz' -o xcache.tar.gz \
	&& mkdir -p xcache \
	&& tar -xf xcache.tar.gz -C xcache --strip-components=1 \
	&& rm xcache.tar.gz \
	&& ( \
		cd xcache \
		&& phpize \
		&& ./configure --enable-xcache \
		&& make -j$(nproc) \
		&& make install \
	) \
	&& rm -r xcache \
	&& docker-php-ext-enable xcache

The docker-php-ext-* scripts can accept an arbitrary path, but it must be absolute (to disambiguate from built-in extension names), so the above example could also be written as the following:

FROM php:5.6-apache
RUN curl -fsSL 'https://xcache.lighttpd.net/pub/Releases/3.2.0/xcache-3.2.0.tar.gz' -o xcache.tar.gz \
	&& mkdir -p /tmp/xcache \
	&& tar -xf xcache.tar.gz -C /tmp/xcache --strip-components=1 \
	&& rm xcache.tar.gz \
	&& docker-php-ext-configure /tmp/xcache --enable-xcache \
	&& docker-php-ext-install /tmp/xcache \
	&& rm -r /tmp/xcache

Changing DocumentRoot

Some applications may wish to change the default DocumentRoot in Apache (away from /var/www/html). The following demonstrates one way to do so using an environment variable (which can then be modified at container runtime as well):

FROM php:7.1-apache

ENV APACHE_DOCUMENT_ROOT /path/to/new/root

RUN sed -ri -e 's!/var/www/html!${APACHE_DOCUMENT_ROOT}!g' /etc/apache2/sites-available/*.conf
RUN sed -ri -e 's!/var/www/!${APACHE_DOCUMENT_ROOT}!g' /etc/apache2/apache2.conf /etc/apache2/conf-available/*.conf

Image Variants

The php images come in many flavors, each designed for a specific use case.

php:<version>

This is the defacto image. If you are unsure about what your needs are, you probably want to use this one. It is designed to be used both as a throw away container (mount your source code and start the container to start your app), as well as the base to build other images off of.

php:alpine

This image is based on the popular Alpine Linux project, available in the alpine official image. Alpine Linux is much smaller than most distribution base images (~5MB), and thus leads to much slimmer images in general.

This variant is highly recommended when final image size being as small as possible is desired. The main caveat to note is that it does use musl libc instead of glibc and friends, so certain software might run into issues depending on the depth of their libc requirements. However, most software doesn’t have an issue with this, so this variant is usually a very safe choice. See this Hacker News comment thread for more discussion of the issues that might arise and some pro/con comparisons of using Alpine-based images.

To minimize image size, it’s uncommon for additional related tools (such as git or bash) to be included in Alpine-based images. Using this image as a base, add the things you need in your own Dockerfile (see the alpine image description for examples of how to install packages if you are unfamiliar).

License

View license information for the software contained in this image.

As with all Docker images, these likely also contain other software which may be under other licenses (such as Bash, etc from the base distribution, along with any direct or indirect dependencies of the primary software being contained).

Some additional license information which was able to be auto-detected might be found in the repo-info repository’s php/ directory.

As for any pre-built image usage, it is the image user’s responsibility to ensure that any use of this image complies with any relevant licenses for all software contained within.

library, sample, php