Container Development Environment Setup

The scripts in this repository help provide a local development environment for developing websites and web applications that will run on Oregon State Universtiy ENGR servers. The production servers run Apache 2.0 with PHP.

Quickstart

1. Install Docker on your machine
   • Windows
   • Linux (Ubuntu)
2. Clone the repository to your machine
3. Run sh dev-setup.sh from the command line on Linux or dev-setup.bat from the command prompt on Windows for details about the setup scripts

Note: On new Macs, you may need to deactivate AirPlay receiver to use ports 5000 and 7000 (default for this tool), or redefine those ports in dev-vars.local.sh.

Environment Setup

See an example setup here

The scripts in this repository create three Docker containers:

• A MySQL container
• A phpMyAdmin Container
• An Apache 2.0/PHP web server container

These three containers work together to provide a local, live interactive development environment for PHP websites and applications. There are default configuration values for the setup in dev-vars.{sh,bat}. These values can be overloaded by creating a dev-vars.local.{sh,bat} file. All .local.{sh,bat} files will be ignored by Git.

The setup scripts take two arguments: the location of the public files to be served by the web server, and the location of private files outside the public web root but accessible by the web application (such as configuration files, secrets, etc.). An example of running the script in Linux would be:

sh dev-setup.sh /home/john/websites/osu/capstone/public /home/john/websites/osu/capstone

The above command assumes that there is a directory websites/osu/capstone under the user john that contains private configuration files for a website (in this example the Capstone site). The websites/osu/capstone/public directory contains the HTML, CSS, PHP, and other assets that will be served by the Apache web server. These files are assumed to be publicly accessible over the internet from a browser, baring any .htaccess file rules that may be present.

Pausing and Resuming Development

You can easily shut down the containers without destroying them to free up computer resources and preserve current environment settings with the dev-stop.{sh,bat} script.

After you have paused development, you can start the containers again using the dev-start.{sh,bat} script.

Switch Development Contexts

It may be the case that you want to work on a different website frontend that shares same backend database with other sites you are working on. Rather than destroying the containers and starting over again, you can use the dev-switch.{sh,bat} script to easily switch development contexts and restart the web server with different public and private directory paths.

sh dev-switch.sh /path/to/new/public /path/to/new/private

Resources

• Docker documentation