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If you are working on Laravel projects and want to set up Nginx with PHP and MySQL quickly, Docker is the best choice. It allows you to run everything inside containers without installing software directly on your machine.

In this guide, I will show you how to configure Laravel with Nginx, PHP, and MySQL using Docker and docker-compose. Just follow the steps and you will have a working setup in minutes.

Step 1: Create Laravel Project

First, we need to create a fresh Laravel project. You can run the below command to generate it:

laravel new my-app

Step 2: Create Dockerfile

Now, let’s create a Dockerfile in the root directory. This will install PHP and Composer inside the container.

Dockerfile

FROM php:8.3-fpm

WORKDIR /var/www/html

RUN apt-get update & apt-get install -y \
    libzip-dev \
    unzip \
    & docker-php-ext-install zip pdo_mysql

# Install Composer
COPY --from=composer:latest /usr/bin/composer /usr/bin/composer

COPY . /var/www/html

# Install PHP dependencies
RUN composer install

RUN chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html
RUN chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/storage /var/www/html/bootstrap/cache /var/www/html/vendor
RUN chmod -R 775 /var/www/html/storage /var/www/html/bootstrap/cache /var/www/html/vendor

EXPOSE 80

Step 3: Create NGINX Config File

Next, create the Nginx configuration file. This will define how Nginx serves your Laravel project.

.docker/apache/default.conf

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

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

    location ~ \.php$ {
        include fastcgi_params;
        fastcgi_pass web:9000;
        fastcgi_index index.php;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $realpath_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $fastcgi_path_info;
        fastcgi_buffers 16 16k;
        fastcgi_buffer_size 32k;
    }

    location ~ /\.ht {
        deny all;
    }
}

Step 4: Create docker-compose.yml

Now, create a docker-compose.yml file. This will define services for web, nginx, and database.

docker-compose.yml

services:
  web:
    build:
      context: .
      dockerfile: Dockerfile
    image: my-laravel-app
    volumes:
      - .:/var/www/html
      - /var/www/html/storage
      - /var/www/html/bootstrap/cache
    working_dir: /var/www/html
    user: "www-data"
    depends_on:
       - db

  nginx:
    image: nginx:latest
    ports:
      - "8080:80"
    volumes:  
      - .:/var/www/html
      - ./.docker/nginx/default.conf:/etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf
    depends_on:
      - web
  
  db:
    image: mysql:8.0
    environment:
      MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: root
      MYSQL_DATABASE: laravel
      MYSQL_USER: laravel
      MYSQL_PASSWORD: secret
    ports:
      - "3307:3306"
    volumes:
      - dbdata:/var/lib/mysql

volumes:
  dbdata:

Run Laravel App:

All the required steps have been done, now you have to type the given below command and hit enter to run the Laravel app:

php artisan serve

Now, Go to your web browser, type the given URL and view the app output:

http://localhost:8080

Now you can use.