Simple example of a Symfony 4 project in Docker

This repository contains a minimal example of using these together:

• PHP 7
• Composer
• Symfony 4 framework
• Nginx Web server
• Docker

How I set up the Symfony application:

First, I created an empty app directory, the docker-compose.yml file and everything in the docker directory.

I started the Docker containers via PhpStorm (docker-compose up would work, too).

Then I ran Composer in the PHP Docker container (replacing $PHPCONTAINERID with the ID shown by docker ps):

$ docker exec \
  --workdir /opt --user daemon:daemon \
  -it $PHPCONTAINERID \
  composer create-project symfony/skeleton app

That’s all it took to set up the latest Symfony skeleton on the latest PHP version!

At that point, I could access my application on http://localhost:8080/. Or run Symfony’s console command:

$ docker exec \
  --workdir /opt/app --user daemon:daemon \
  -it $PHPCONTAINERID \
  bin/console about
 -------------------- --------------------------------- 
  Symfony                                               
 -------------------- --------------------------------- 
  Version              4.3.1
  …                            
 -------------------- --------------------------------- 
  PHP                                                   
 -------------------- --------------------------------- 
  Version              7.3.5        
  … 

The only thing I changed in the Symfony application afterwards was directing Symfony logs to STDOUT so I could see them as Docker container output. To do this, I added Monolog via Composer:

$ docker exec \
  --workdir /opt/app --user daemon:daemon \ 
  -it $PHPCONTAINERID \
  composer require symfony/monolog-bundle

… and modified app/config/packages/dev/monolog.yaml, replacing

path: "%kernel.logs_dir%/%kernel.environment%.log"

with:

path: "php://stdout"

As the next step, you will likely want to create your first page in Symfony!