--- title: Containerize a PHP application linkTitle: Containerize your app weight: 10 keywords: php, containerize, initialize, apache, composer description: Learn how to containerize a PHP application. aliases: - /language/php/containerize/ --- ## Prerequisites * You have installed the latest version of [Docker Desktop](/get-started/get-docker.md). * You have a [git client](https://git-scm.com/downloads). The examples in this section use a command-line based git client, but you can use any client. ## Overview This section walks you through containerizing and running a PHP application. ## Get the sample applications In this guide, you will use a pre-built PHP application. The application uses Composer for library dependency management. You'll serve the application via an Apache web server. Open a terminal, change directory to a directory that you want to work in, and run the following command to clone the repository. ```console $ git clone https://github.com/docker/docker-php-sample ``` The sample application is a basic hello world application and an application that increments a counter in a database. In addition, the application uses PHPUnit for testing. ## Initialize Docker assets Now that you have an application, you can use `docker init` to create the necessary Docker assets to containerize your application. Inside the `docker-php-sample` directory, run the `docker init` command in a terminal. `docker init` provides some default configuration, but you'll need to answer a few questions about your application. For example, this application uses PHP version 8.2. Refer to the following `docker init` example and use the same answers for your prompts. ```console $ docker init Welcome to the Docker Init CLI! This utility will walk you through creating the following files with sensible defaults for your project: - .dockerignore - Dockerfile - compose.yaml - README.Docker.md Let's get started! ? What application platform does your project use? PHP with Apache ? What version of PHP do you want to use? 8.2 ? What's the relative directory (with a leading .) for your app? ./src ? What local port do you want to use to access your server? 9000 ``` You should now have the following contents in your `docker-php-sample` directory. ```text ├── docker-php-sample/ │ ├── .git/ │ ├── src/ │ ├── tests/ │ ├── .dockerignore │ ├── .gitignore │ ├── compose.yaml │ ├── composer.json │ ├── composer.lock │ ├── Dockerfile │ ├── README.Docker.md │ └── README.md ``` To learn more about the files that `docker init` added, see the following: - [Dockerfile](/reference/dockerfile.md) - [.dockerignore](/reference/dockerfile.md#dockerignore-file) - [compose.yaml](/reference/compose-file/_index.md) ## Run the application Inside the `docker-php-sample` directory, run the following command in a terminal. ```console $ docker compose up --build ``` Open a browser and view the application at [http://localhost:9000/hello.php](http://localhost:9000/hello.php). You should see a simple hello world application. In the terminal, press `ctrl`+`c` to stop the application. ### Run the application in the background You can run the application detached from the terminal by adding the `-d` option. Inside the `docker-php-sample` directory, run the following command in a terminal. ```console $ docker compose up --build -d ``` Open a browser and view the application at [http://localhost:9000/hello.php](http://localhost:9000/hello.php). You should see a simple hello world application. In the terminal, run the following command to stop the application. ```console $ docker compose down ``` For more information about Compose commands, see the [Compose CLI reference](/reference/cli/docker/compose/_index.md). ## Summary In this section, you learned how you can containerize and run a simple PHP application using Docker. Related information: - [docker init reference](/reference/cli/docker/init.md) ## Next steps In the next section, you'll learn how you can develop your application using Docker containers. {{< button text="Develop your application" url="develop.md" >}}