How Docker Solves the Pain of Local Development Environments

Local Development Pain

Before development you often need to install various tools and services, which can lead to dependency issues, environment variable conflicts, port collisions, and compilation problems. During development you may need additional services, and inconsistencies across teammates' operating systems can cause further headaches. Finally, code that works locally may break when deployed because production environments differ.

What is Docker?

Docker is an open‑source container engine that lets developers package applications and their dependencies into portable containers that run on any Linux machine. Containers use sandboxing, making them lightweight and isolated; think of them as portable application containers.

Benefits of Docker for Local Development

Rapid Experimentation

Docker lets you spin up environments with a single command, handling everything from OS versions to specific software, saving time when trying new technologies.

Unified Development and Production

Using Docker ensures the same environment across Windows, macOS, and Linux, and if production also uses Docker you can ship the same container image, eliminating environment drift.

High Performance

Containers have lower memory overhead than virtual machines and start in seconds, providing a near‑instant development experience.

Showcase Ready

Docker images can be shared for demos without worrying about the target machine’s configuration.

Installing Docker

On macOS download the dmg file, double‑click and drag to install; Windows follows a similar process. Verify installation with docker version which should display version information.

Client: Docker Engine - Community
Version: 18.09.0
API version: 1.39
Go version: go1.10.4
Git commit: 4d60db4
Built: Wed Nov 7 00:47:43 2018
OS/Arch: darwin/amd64
Experimental: false

Server: Docker Engine - Community
Engine:
  Version: 18.09.0
  API version: 1.39 (minimum version 1.12)
  Go version: go1.10.4
  Git commit: 4d60db4
  Built: Wed Nov 7 00:55:00 2018
  OS/Arch: linux/amd64
  Experimental: true

Installing Docker‑Compose

After installing Docker, Docker‑Compose is included. Verify with docker-compose version. If the command fails, reinstall.

➜  ~ docker-compose version 1.23.2, build 1110ad01
docker-py version: 3.6.0
CPython version: 3.6.6
OpenSSL version: OpenSSL 1.1.0h  27 Mar 2018

Cloning Laradock

Clone the Laradock repository into a directory (e.g., ~/Docker/laradock) from https://github.com/laradock/laradock.

Configuring the .env File

Copy env-example to .env.

Set APP_CODE_PATH_HOST to your local project path and APP_CODE_PATH_CONTAINER to the container path if needed.

Enable Xdebug by setting PHP_FPM_INSTALL_XDEBUG and WORKSPACE_INSTALL_XDEBUG to true.

Adjust any other options by searching the .env file.

Running the Containers

Navigate to the Laradock directory and start the services: docker-compose up -d nginx mysql This builds the images if they do not exist and starts nginx, php-fpm, workspace, and mysql containers in the background.

Configuring the Laravel Project

Update the Laravel .env with database settings, ensuring the host is the Docker service name (e.g., mysql) rather than 127.0.0.1 or localhost. Similar alias rules apply for Redis or Memcached.

Configuring the Host File

Add a virtual domain to /etc/hosts:

127.0.0.1   blog.test

Configuring Nginx

Copy laravel.conf.example to blog.conf and edit server_name and root to match your project:

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name blog.test;
    root /var/www/blog/public;
    index index.php index.html index.htm;
    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php$is_args$args;
    }
    location ~ \.php$ {
        try_files $uri /index.php =404;
        fastcgi_pass php-upstream;
        fastcgi_index index.php;
        fastcgi_buffers 16 16k;
        fastcgi_buffer_size 32k;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        fastcgi_read_timeout 600;
        include fastcgi_params;
    }
}

Accessing the Application

Visit http://blog.test/ in a browser; the page should load correctly.