Lumen by Laravel is a PHP micro-framework for creating APIs and microservices. With Lumen you can enjoy a robust development environment which contains many core Laravel features like the artisan cli, routing, middleware, migrations, eloquent ORM and much more.

In this tutorial, we will install Lumen with Composer, containerize our Lumen app + MySQL with Docker and go over some examples of interacting with our dockerized Lumen project. In the first part of this tutorial, we will focus on installing our Lumen app and get it up and running with Docker.

Install Lumen with Composer

First, make sure you have Composer installed by running the following command in your terminal:

composer -v
# or 
composer --version

Install Lumen by running:

composer create-project --prefer-dist laravel/lumen lumen-app

Now, if all goes well your Lumen project was successfully created inside /path/to/your/lumen-app/ and you can cd to your project. Now, start your Lumen project by running the following PHP command in your project's root directory:

php -S localhost:8000 -t public

Visit localhost:8000 or use something like Postman to verify you get a 200 response.

Docker setup

First, make sure you have Docker installed and running:

docker -v
# or
docker --version

We will be creating a docker-compose.yml file so you need to make sure you have docker-compose enabled/installed. If you’re using Docker Desktop for Windows or Mac, you probably already have docker-compose up and running. In any case, check the availability of the docker-compose command with:

docker-compose -v
# or 
docker-compose --version

Now, let’s dockerize our app with a Dockerfile and a docker-compose.yml file.

Dockerfile

Create a file named Dockerfile in your project's root directory:

FROM php:7.3-fpm-alpine

WORKDIR /var/www/html/

RUN php -r "readfile('http://getcomposer.org/installer');" | php -- --install-dir=/usr/bin/ --filename=composer

COPY . .

RUN composer install

In our Dockerfile we set our container to run PHP 7.3. Then, install Composer, copy all our project’s files to the container and finish by running composer install to install Lumen's dependencies.

docker-compose.yml

Now, create a docker-compose.yml file in your project’s root directory:

version: '3.5'

services:
  lumen:
    ports:
      - "8000:8000"
    volumes:
      - .:/var/www/html
      - /var/www/html/vendor/
    build: .
    command: php -S lumen:8000 -t public
    restart: always

Before building and running our Lumen project on Docker, it is useful to check that you have your machine’s 8000 port free for use. You can check that by running:

docker ps

If one of your docker containers is listening on 8000, stop/kill that container or modify the port configs in you docker-compose.yml file.

You can now remove the /vendor/ folder from your project’s directory and run:

docker-compose up --build

Now, you can visit localhost:8000 and start creating an amazing API/microservice!

In the next part of this tutorial, we will add MySQL as a service to our docker-compose.yml file and start interacting with our dockerized app.

Here is a link to the GitHub repository for this tutorial:

👉 https://github.com/yossi-abramov/lumen-mysql-docker

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