Image Overview: php

Overview: php Chainguard Image

Minimalist Wolfi-based PHP images for building and running PHP applications. Includes both dev and fpm variants.

Image Variants

Our latest tags use the most recent build of the Wolfi PHP package. The following tagged variants are available without authentication:

latest: This is a distroless image for running command-line PHP applications. It does not include Composer or busybox, so no shell will be available.
latest-dev: This is a development / builder image that includes Composer, apk-tools, and busybox. This variant allows you to customize your final image with additional Wolfi packages.
latest-fpm: This is the distroless php-fpm image variant, designed to be used together with our Nginx image.

PHP Version

This will automatically pull the image to your local system and execute the command php --version:

docker run --rm cgr.dev/chainguard/php --version

You should see output similar to this:

PHP 8.2.1 (cli) (built: Jan  1 1970 00:00:00) (NTS)
Copyright (c) The PHP Group
Zend Engine v4.2.1, Copyright (c) Zend Technologies

Application Setup for End Users

When creating a Dockerfile to extend from these images, the recommended approach is to set up a multi-stage build so that you’re able to install your Composer dependencies on a separate environment and then copy the files over to a smaller production image.

CLI Scripts and Applications

The following example demonstrates how to set up a multi-stage Dockerfile build in the context of command line PHP applications:

FROM cgr.dev/chainguard/php:latest-dev AS builder
COPY . /app
RUN cd /app && \
    composer install --no-progress --no-dev --prefer-dist

FROM cgr.dev/chainguard/php:latest
COPY --from=builder /app /app

ENTRYPOINT [ "php", "/app/command" ]

Web Applications / APIs

For web applications, you should follow the same principle, but using the php-fpm variant for the final image. You’ll also need a custom nginx.conf file to set up your Nginx service with PHP-FPM.

A good way to test your setup locally is by using Docker Compose. The following docker-compose.yaml file demonstrates how to create a web server environment using the Nginx Chainguard Image :

version: "3.7"
services:
  app:
    image: cgr.dev/chainguard/php:latest-fpm
    restart: unless-stopped
    working_dir: /app
    volumes:
      - ./:/app
    networks:
      - wolfi

  nginx:
    image: cgr.dev/chainguard/nginx
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - 8000:80
    volumes:
      - ./:/app
      - ./nginx.conf:/etc/nginx/nginx.conf
    networks:
      - wolfi

networks:
  wolfi:
    driver: bridge

You’ll notice the Nginx service has a volume share to set up a custom config file. The following nginx.conf file sets up Nginx to serve pages from a /app/public folder and redirects requests to .php files to the app service on port 9000.

events {
  worker_connections  1024;
}

http {
    server {
        listen 80;
        index index.php index.html;
        root /app/public;
        location ~ \.php$ {
            try_files $uri =404;
            fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
            fastcgi_pass app:9000;
            fastcgi_index index.php;
            include fastcgi_params;
            fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
            fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $fastcgi_path_info;
        }
        location / {
            try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
            gzip_static on;
        }
    }
}

For more detailed information on how to use these images, check the Getting Started with the PHP Chainguard Images guide.

Detailed Environment Information

To obtain detailed information about the environment, you can run a php --info command on any of the image tags and use grep to look for a specific module or extension.

For instance, to check for curl settings, you can run:

docker run --rm cgr.dev/chainguard/php:latest --info | grep curl