Web development transition from MAMP to Docker

Question

I am new to Docker and I am having a hard time applying its core technology to my present web development. Using MAMP, you just need to download the app, put your PHP/HTML files on /htdocs, start servers, then go to http://localhost:8888/ to see your webapp. Now, using docker, I’m wondering how can I do the same. What I’ve done so far is to pull http, php and mysql images from the Docker Hub.

1. How can I link these three images together to make them work? Or How should I run them simultaneously?
2. Where should I put the /htdocs or how can I access it?
3. MAMP has a phpMyAdmin for database access, does Docker has something like this?

I’m working on a Mac OS X Yosemite (10.10.1) with boot2docker v1.4.1 and VirtualBox 4.3.20.

Answer 1

You can now use docker-compose and a docker-compose.yml file to accomplish the same thing as fig.

Finding containers for each service and linking them together isn't the easiest thing. The docker-compose file from The damp github project (pasted below for posterity) is a good start for how to get the apache, php, and mysql services all running with a docker-compose -f docker-compose.yml up command.

proxy:
    image: jwilder/nginx-proxy
    ports: ['80:80']
    volumes: ['/var/run/docker.sock:/tmp/docker.sock:ro']
    environment: [DEFAULT_HOST=damp.dev]
database:
    image: 'mysql:5.7'
    ports: ['3306:3306']
    environment: [MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=password]
phpmyadmin:
    image: corbinu/docker-phpmyadmin
    links: ['database:mysql']
    environment: [MYSQL_USERNAME=root, MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=password, VIRTUAL_HOST=phpmyadmin.damp.dev]
damp:
    image: httpd
    volumes: ['~/damp/damp:/usr/local/apache2/htdocs']
    environment: [VIRTUAL_HOST=damp.dev]

Once you do that _and put an entry for damp.dev 127.0.0.1 in your hosts file, anything you mount in ~/damp/damp (per that second to last line) will be put in the htdocs of the docker container and served up on damp.dev/[whatever].

damp is just the first example I found poking around on how to replicate MAMP with docker. The most important thing to note is that you can use docker-compose instead of fig. Compose is based directly on the Fig codebase and is backwards-compatible with Fig applications.