Having got individual docker containers up and running doing simple enough things like serving a html page, basic phpinfo and a mysql server it’s time to try and tie these things together.

The idea is two containers one with apache/php and the other a mysql server and have one talk to the other.

So a few things more than the basics, need to link containers and there’s a bit more setup this time, the php server will need the mysql drivers installed, mysql should init a database, etc…

Apache / PHP

As mentioned this needs mysql drivers and other config I have a dockerfile and blog post about it Creating a better Docker PHP

MySql

I created a dockerfile for this that preloads the database based off a sql file etc… blog post about it Creating a better Docker Mysql

Tying it together

To tie it together I’m going to use Docker Compose, sure seems like the correct fit. It will build and start both servers, in the correct order and link them.

Create a docker-compose.yml

version: '2'
services:
  php:
    build: ./php-server
    image: php-img
    ports:
      - "80:80"
    links:
      - an-mysql:an-mysql
    volumes:
      - ./php-server:/var/www/html
  an-mysql:
    build: ./sql
    image: mysql-img
    ports:
      - "3306:3306"
    environment:
      - MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=password

Basically is takes the normal docker run commands and puts them in the yaml structure.

To run go to the directory with the compose file and run

docker-compose up

First time it runs it will build the two containers and start them You can check up on them by running

docker-compose ps

Stop them with

docker-compose stop

And many more see the docs