This repository contains a general-purpose base PHP docker image for use in Bluewing applications that combines the lightweight base image of Alpine Linux with the speed-wins normally gained through using Debian.
Alpine Linux PHP docker images are typically 6× smaller in size or more, which makes them an excellent choice due to their lightweight footprint. They do however come with the disadvantage that they ship with musl libc instead of glib and friends. This means that the PHP extensions we need as part of our application stack must be compiled from source, installed of installed from a precompiled binary, which significantly slows the build time—up to 800 seconds or more to build a base image with the dependencies we need.
We have extracted these long build times to an infrequently-modified Docker image that can be built once in CI and pulled as much as necessary.
Two image variants are available, a primary image that requires in pdo_pgsql and phpredis so we can use a development image tagged dev which additionally includes xdebug.
| Tag | PHP version | Alpine Version | Extensions | Build size |
|---|---|---|---|---|
dev-8.1.4-latest |
8.1.4 | 3.15 | pdo_pgsql,redis-5.3.7, xdebug-3.1.5 |
|
main-8.1.4-latest |
8.1.4 | 3.15 | pdo_pgsql, redis-5.3.7, |
Each flavour of image is tagged three times, making it possible to select images based purely on the latest version, the latest version of a specific PHP release, or a specific image entirely:
FLAVOR-latestFLAVOR-PHP_VERSION-latestFLAVOR-PHP_VERSION-DATE
PHP extensions are installed using the thecodingmachine/docker-images-php Docker image.
Each image is built when a release occurs, using GitHub Actions, and published to GitHub Container Registry. To use these images in your Dockerfile, reference them as follows:
# Development, includes xdebug along with other extensions.
FROM ghcr.io/bluewing/php-docker-image:dev-latest
# Production, only pdo_pgsql and redis
FROM ghcr.io/bluewing/php-docker-image:main-latest