PHP

PHP apps are served from your project root with index.php as the front controller. Requests for real files (assets, other .php scripts) are served directly; everything else is handled by your index.php.

• Put an index.php at the project root.
• If a composer.json is present, its dependencies are installed for you (production, optimized). No composer.json is fine for a plain PHP app — omit it.

Supported versions are 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4, defaulting to 8.3 — see Choosing a version.

What gets built

FROM php:<version>-apache
WORKDIR /var/www/html
COPY . /var/www/html
RUN if [ -f composer.json ]; then \
      curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php -- --install-dir=/usr/local/bin --filename=composer && \
      composer install --no-dev --no-interaction --optimize-autoloader; \
    fi
EXPOSE 80

Apache serves the project root on port 80. Your whole project is the document root, so anything you ship is reachable — keep configuration and secrets out of the tree and in environment variables instead.

--no-dev means dev dependencies are not installed. If your app needs something at run time, it belongs in require, not require-dev.

Frameworks

Laravel, Symfony and most others expect the document root to be public/, not the project root. Two ways to make that work:

• Move the front controller. Put an index.php at the root that requires public/index.php, and make sure your asset paths still resolve.
• Bring your own Dockerfile and set the Apache document root properly. For anything beyond a small app, this is the cleaner option — you also get to run migrations and cache warming at build time.

Only the extensions in the official php:<version>-apache image are available; a framework needing intl, gd, pdo_mysql or similar needs its own Dockerfile with those installed.

Common failures