ℹ️ About Alpine PHP Webserver

A minimal Nginx + PHP-FPM Docker image built on Alpine Linux.

Attribution

This documentation is a fork of erseco/alpine-php-webserver. The upstream documentation is available here.

What is this image?

ruseler/alpine-php-webserver packages Nginx, PHP-FPM and a handful of common PHP extensions into a ~25 MB container ready to serve any PHP application. It is designed to be:

• Small — Alpine base, single-process-group runtime via runit.
• Secure — Nginx and PHP-FPM run as the unprivileged nobody user.
• Fast — ondemand FPM process manager; Unix socket between Nginx and PHP; OPcache-ready.
• Extensible — drop extra daemons into /etc/service/<name>/run, init scripts into /docker-entrypoint-init.d/, Nginx snippets into /etc/nginx/conf.d/ or /etc/nginx/server-conf.d/.
• Configurable via env vars — every meaningful PHP / Nginx setting is templated at startup via envsubst.

This image is the base for ruseler/alpine-moodle and powers numerous Symfony, Laravel, WordPress and plain PHP deployments.

Features

• Lightweight: built on Alpine Linux for a compact final image
• Nginx + PHP-FPM: runs both via runit, avoiding the overhead of supervisord
• Non-root by default: Nginx and PHP-FPM run as nobody for improved security
• Environment-variable driven: tune PHP limits, OPcache, timeouts, and reverse-proxy/trusted-IP settings without touching config files
• Healthcheck included: built-in HEALTHCHECK hitting the FPM ping endpoint
• Composer-friendly: designed to be extended with Composer-based builds for your own PHP projects

Where to start

• 🚀 Quick Start — serve your ./php directory in under a minute.
• 🐳 Docker Compose — local dev stacks, mounting code, building your own image.
• ⚙️ Nginx Configuration — conf.d vs server-conf.d, custom routing, DISABLE_DEFAULT_LOCATION.
• 🐘 PHP Configuration — custom.ini, OPcache, timezone, locale.
• 🗄️ Environment Variables — every supported knob.
• 🔒 Reverse Proxy & Trusted IPs — Traefik, Nginx, Cloudflare, Cloudflare Tunnel.
• 📦 Composer & Building — recipes for building production images.
• 🧩 Extending the Image — runit daemons, init scripts, running as root.
• ❤️ Healthcheck & Logs — what /fpm-ping does and where logs go.
• 💡 Troubleshooting — solutions to recurring issues.
• ❓ FAQ — quick answers.

Minimal example

docker push ruseler/alpine-php-webserver:tagname

docker run --rm -p 8080:8080 ruseler/alpine-php-webserver

• http://localhost:8080/ — phpinfo()
• http://localhost:8080/test.html — static HTML probe

Mount your own code to serve it:

docker run --rm -p 8080:8080 -v "$PWD/php:/var/www/html" ruseler/alpine-php-webserver

Project links

• Source code: https://github.com/AdrianoRuseler/alpine-php-webserver
• Docker Hub: https://hub.docker.com/r/ruseler/alpine-php-webserver
• Issue tracker: https://github.com/AdrianoRuseler/alpine-php-webserver/issues

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This documentation is a fork of erseco/alpine-php-webserver. The upstream documentation is available here.