Set up a complete Laravel development environment with Docker Compose including PHP-FPM, Nginx, MySQL, and Redis. Reproducible local stacks for every team member.

Introduction

Inconsistent development environments waste hours of debugging time. Docker Compose solves this by defining your entire Laravel stack in a single YAML file that every team member can spin up identically. No more "works on my machine" issues, no conflicting PHP versions, and no manual MySQL installations.

This guide builds a production-like local environment with PHP-FPM, Nginx, MySQL 8, and Redis - all orchestrated through Docker Compose.

Project Structure

project-root/
├── docker/
│   ├── nginx/
│   │   └── default.conf
│   └── php/
│       └── Dockerfile
├── docker-compose.yml
├── .env
└── ... (Laravel files)

The Docker Compose File

version: "3.8"

services:
  app:
    build:
      context: .
      dockerfile: docker/php/Dockerfile
    container_name: laravel-app
    volumes:
      - .:/var/www/html
    networks:
      - laravel
    depends_on:
      - mysql
      - redis

  nginx:
    image: nginx:1.25-alpine
    container_name: laravel-nginx
    ports:
      - "8080:80"
    volumes:
      - .:/var/www/html
      - ./docker/nginx/default.conf:/etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf
    networks:
      - laravel
    depends_on:
      - app

  mysql:
    image: mysql:8.0
    container_name: laravel-mysql
    environment:
      MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: secret
      MYSQL_DATABASE: laravel
      MYSQL_USER: laravel
      MYSQL_PASSWORD: secret
    ports:
      - "3306:3306"
    volumes:
      - mysql-data:/var/lib/mysql
    networks:
      - laravel

  redis:
    image: redis:7-alpine
    container_name: laravel-redis
    ports:
      - "6379:6379"
    networks:
      - laravel

networks:
  laravel:

volumes:
  mysql-data:

PHP Dockerfile

Create docker/php/Dockerfile:

FROM php:8.3-fpm

RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y \
    git unzip libpng-dev libonig-dev libxml2-dev libzip-dev \
    && docker-php-ext-install pdo_mysql mbstring zip exif pcntl bcmath gd \
    && pecl install redis && docker-php-ext-enable redis

COPY --from=composer:latest /usr/bin/composer /usr/bin/composer

WORKDIR /var/www/html

Nginx Configuration

Create docker/nginx/default.conf:

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name localhost;
    root /var/www/html/public;
    index index.php;

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
    }

    location ~ \.php$ {
        fastcgi_pass app:9000;
        fastcgi_index index.php;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        include fastcgi_params;
    }
}

Running the Stack

# Build and start all services
docker compose up -d --build

# Install dependencies
docker compose exec app composer install

# Run migrations
docker compose exec app php artisan migrate

# Verify
curl http://localhost:8080

This approach pairs well with CI/CD pipelines. For teams managing multiple services, check out our guide on WordPress Multisite on Kubernetes. Explore our DevOps as a Service offering to streamline your entire workflow.

Docker Compose gives Laravel teams a consistent, portable development environment that mirrors production. Adding services like Mailhog, MinIO, or Elasticsearch is a matter of appending a few lines to the YAML file. Commit the Docker configuration alongside your application code and every contributor starts from the same baseline.

Or read how we handle it in DevOps as a Service.

Laravel

Laravel Queue Workers with Supervisor and Redis

Configure Laravel queue workers with Supervisor and Redis for reliable background job processing, automatic restarts, and graceful deployment handling on production servers.

Server & DevOps

Debugging an Airbyte 'All the Defined Primary Keys Are Null' Outage

One of our clients had an Airbyte MySQL to BigQuery pipeline that stopped syncing over a weekend, failing every run with the same error, all the defined primary keys are null. It looked like a data problem. It was not. Here is the two-bug postmortem, including the mid-incident connector upgrade we made that quietly made it worse, and how ruling out suspects one at a time found the real causes.

Next.js

Keep Your Next.js Site Online While You Sleep

Your Next.js app is only as real as its uptime. See how proper monitoring, SLOs, and a calm on-call rhythm turn 'sometimes up' into 'always reliable'.

Docker Compose for Laravel Development Environments