Comprehensive guide to Laravel with Docker on AWS

Creating a Laravel application using Docker and deploying it to an AWS server can streamline your development workflow and provide a stable production environment. This blog post covers the process step by step, allowing you to dockerize your Laravel application and get it up and running on AWS.

Prerequisites:

Before proceeding, make sure that you have the following installed:

• Docker and Docker Compose
• AWS CLI configured with the necessary access permissions
• Git (optional for version control)

Step 1: Set Up a New Laravel Project

First, create a new Laravel project by using Composer. You can skip this step if you already have a Laravel project ready.

composer create-project laravel/laravel laravel-docker-app
cd laravel-docker-app

Step 2: Dockerize the Laravel Application

You'll need to create a `Dockerfile` and a `docker-compose.yml` file.

Here's a basic example of a `Dockerfile` for PHP 8.1 with Laravel:

Dockerfile
FROM php:8.1-fpm-alpine

# Install system dependencies
RUN apk update && apk add --no-cache \
    build-base shadow vim curl \
    php8 \
    php8-fpm \
    php8-common \
    php8-pdo \
    php8-pdo_mysql \
    php8-mbstring \
    php8-tokenizer \
    php8-xml \
    php8-zip \
    php8-gd \
    php8-dom \
    php8-session \
    php8-zlib \
    nginx \
    supervisor

# Copy existing application directory contents to the Docker image
COPY . /var/www/html

# Set working directory
WORKDIR /var/www/html

# Expose port 9000 and start php-fpm server
EXPOSE 9000
CMD ["php-fpm"]

Next, define services in your `docker-compose.yml` file:

yaml
version: '3'
services:
  app:
    build:
      context: .
      dockerfile: Dockerfile
    container_name: laravel_app
    restart: unless-stopped
    working_dir: /var/www/html
    volumes:
      - ./:/var/www/html
    networks:
      - app-network
  
  # Other services like database can be added here

networks:
  app-network:
    driver: bridge

Step 3: Run the Docker Container

Execute the following command within your project directory:

docker-compose up -d

This will build the Docker image and run the containers.

Step 4: AWS Deployment Preparation

To deploy your Dockerized Laravel application on AWS, you could use AWS Elastic Beanstalk, which supports Docker out of the box.

First, ensure you have an Elastic Beanstalk Docker environment set up. For detailed instructions, please check the AWS documentation since it's beyond the scope of this blog post.

With the environment ready, proceed as follows:

Create a Dockerrun.aws.json File

This file describes how to deploy a Docker container as an Elastic Beanstalk application.

json
{
  "AWSEBDockerrunVersion": "1",
  "Image": {
    "Name": "your-docker-image-name",
    "Update": "true"
  },
  "Ports": [
    {
      "ContainerPort": "9000"
    }
  ]
}

Replace `your-docker-image-name` with the name of your Docker image.

Step 5: Deploy to AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Push your Docker image to a registry (Docker Hub, Amazon ECR, etc.) and then use the EB CLI to deploy your application.

eb init -p docker your-app-name
eb create your-env-name
eb open

This will initialize your EB application, create the environment, and then open your application in the browser.

Additional Tips:

• Use environment variables to manage different configurations between development and production.
• Securely store sensitive credentials using AWS Secrets Manager or environment properties in Elastic Beanstalk.
• Monitor your application through AWS CloudWatch to maintain and understand application performance.
• Always test your Docker container locally before deploying it to AWS.

Conclusion

Dockerizing a Laravel application and deploying it to AWS can seem complex, but with the right tools and processes, it can be streamlined effectively. By following these steps, you can have a working version of a Laravel application running on AWS, taking advantage of Docker's containerization benefits.

Remember that configurations and requirements might differ based on your specific project, and always ensure that you adhere to best practices for security and performance when deploying applications to the cloud.