New Laravel Project

Assumptions

This guide has a few critical assumptions before moving forward:

1. You have spin installed on your machine
2. You're starting a new, simple Laravel project
3. You have Docker installed and running on your machine

Create a new Laravel Project with Composer

We can use Docker to run composer and download Laravel in a new folder.

Run this command in the directory you want to create a new Laravel project in:

docker run --rm -e "S6_LOGGING=1" -v $(pwd):/var/www/html serversideup/php:8.1-fpm composer create-project laravel/laravel example-app

Add the "Docker Compose" templates to your project

As we explain in our Introduction & Concepts page, we have two files that are critical for development:

1. docker-compose.yml
2. docker-compose.dev.yml

Feel free to use these files as your simple Laravel example:

docker-compose.yml

version: '3.8'
services:
  php:
    image: serversideup/php:8.1-fpm-nginx
    working_dir: /var/www/html

  mariadb:
    image: mariadb:10.7
  
  node:
    image: node:lts

docker-compose.dev.yml

version: '3.8'
services: 
  mariadb:
    networks:
      - web-dev
    environment:
        MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: "rootpassword"
        MARIADB_DATABASE: "laravel"
        MARIADB_USER: "example-app-user"
        MARIADB_PASSWORD: "example-app-password"
    volumes:
      # Add volume for all database files
      - ./_volumes/mysql/database_data/:/var/lib/mysql
      # Add volume for custom configurations
      - ./_volumes/mysql/conf.d/:/etc/mysql/conf.d
      - ./_volumes/mysql/docker-entrypoint-initdb.d/:/docker-entrypoint-initdb.d
    ports:
      - target: 3306
        published: 3306
        mode: host

  php:
    networks:
        - web-dev
    ports:
      # Listen on port 80, default for HTTP
      - target: 80
        published: 80
        mode: host
      # Listen on port 443, default for HTTPS
      - target: 443
        published: 443
        mode: host
    volumes:
      - .:/var/www/html/:cached
    depends_on:
      - "mariadb"

  node:
    networks:
      - web-dev
    volumes:
      - .:/usr/src/app/:cached
    working_dir: /usr/src/app/

networks:
  web-dev:

Configure your Laravel .env

Make sure you update these variables to look like this (or whatever you changed them to):

DB_CONNECTION=mysql
DB_HOST=mariadb
DB_PORT=3306
DB_DATABASE=laravel
DB_USERNAME=example-app-user
DB_PASSWORD=example-app-password

Add ./volumes to your ".gitignore"

We want your database information to be persistent, so we store them in your project under ./volumes. You will not want this information committed to your repo.

.gitignore

# Ignore the _volumes folder
/_volumes/*

Configure your hosts file

Add this entry to your hosts file:

127.0.0.1 laravel.dev.test

The hosts file is simulating DNS for us. You can find it at:

• MacOS: /etc/hosts
• Linux: /etc/hosts
• Windows: C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts

Spin up your development environment

spin up

You'll start to see a bunch of output in your terminal. Wait for this to fully come up (the output should slow down or stop).

Important note: On your first provision, you must wait for the database to provision the user. Look at the Docker compose output for "financial-freedom-mariadb-1". It will say something like `[Entrypoint]: Creating user example-app-user

Visit your local development site

Open up a browser window and visit http://laravel.dev.test.

Run your migrations

Using exec, let's run a command in our existing PHP containers.

Open a new terminal window/tab, then run this:

spin exec php php artisan migrate

If everything is up and running correctly, you should see the migrations completed successfully.

Adding services

This is a very basic example of getting up and running with Laravel. If you're looking to add more services, check out the "Common Services" section in the navigation for more advanced use cases!