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PHP Academy · Lesson

Containerizing a PHP Application

Write a production-ready PHP Dockerfile.

Why Containerize PHP

Shipping PHP reproducibly means freezing the exact interpreter version, extensions, and OS libraries alongside your code. A Docker image gives every environment — laptop, CI, prod — the same php -v and the same ext-* set.

In this lesson we build a production-ready image: PHP-FPM, only the extensions you need, tuned configs, a non-root user, and a health check.

FPM vs Apache Base

The official PHP images come in flavors. For a production web app behind nginx/traefik, prefer php:8.3-fpm-alpine (small) or php:8.3-fpm (Debian, glibc — fewer surprises with native libs).

  • cli — workers, queues, cron
  • fpm — FastCGI process manager, pair with nginx
  • apache — bundled Apache, convenient but heavier

Pin the minor version. Never use :latest in prod.

# Base image choice in your Dockerfile
FROM php:8.3-fpm-alpine AS base

# Why alpine? ~30MB base vs ~140MB Debian.
# Tradeoff: musl libc, occasional native-extension friction.

All lessons in this course

  1. Containerizing a PHP Application
  2. Multi-Stage Builds and Optimization
  3. Docker Compose for Local Stacks
  4. CI/CD with GitHub Actions
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