📦 Composer & Building Your Own Image

alpine-php-webserver intentionally ships without Composer so the base image stays at ~25 MB. For projects that need Composer, build a thin image on top.

Development: install Composer at runtime

Good for quickly testing a project without building a custom image:

docker run --rm -it \
  -v "$PWD:/var/www/html" \
  -w /var/www/html \
  --user root \
  ruseler/alpine-php-webserver \
  sh -c "apk add --no-cache composer && composer install"

tip

Use this only for one-off tasks. Adding packages at runtime every boot is slow and leaves you without reproducible builds.

Production: bake Composer into your image

This is the pattern you want for CI/CD pipelines:

FROM ruseler/alpine-php-webserver:latest

USER root
RUN apk add --no-cache composer

COPY --chown=nobody:nobody ./ /var/www/html
WORKDIR /var/www/html

USER nobody

RUN composer install \
    --no-dev \
    --optimize-autoloader \
    --no-interaction \
    --no-progress

USER root
RUN apk del composer
USER nobody

Build it:

docker build -t myapp:latest .
docker run --rm -p 8080:8080 myapp:latest

Things to note:

• COPY --chown=nobody:nobody — the image runs as nobody. Without this, files will be owned by root and PHP-FPM will see them, but cache/log directories will not be writable.
• WORKDIR /var/www/html — Composer must run in the directory that actually contains composer.json (#40). Running it somewhere else produces "Composer could not find a composer.json file in /var/www/html".
• USER nobody before composer install — Composer writes to vendor/, which has to end up owned by nobody so the runtime user can read it. Running Composer as root is legal but then you need an extra chown.
• Removing Composer after install is optional but recommended — it trims about 5 MB and removes a tool attackers could misuse inside the container.

Multi-stage builds

For bigger projects, split dependencies and runtime:

# ---- build stage ----
FROM composer:2 AS build

WORKDIR /app
COPY composer.json composer.lock ./
RUN composer install --no-dev --optimize-autoloader --no-interaction --no-progress

COPY . .
RUN composer dump-autoload --no-dev --classmap-authoritative

# ---- runtime stage ----
FROM ruseler/alpine-php-webserver:latest

COPY --from=build --chown=nobody:nobody /app /var/www/html
WORKDIR /var/www/html

Advantages:

• Runtime image stays tiny (no Composer binary, no build cache).
• vendor/ is installed once during the build stage, not on every container start.
• Works great with BuildKit cache mounts for even faster builds.

Private Composer packages

Private repositories need an auth token. Pass it as a build secret so it never ends up in the final image:

# syntax=docker/dockerfile:1.6
FROM ruseler/alpine-php-webserver:latest

USER root
RUN apk add --no-cache composer

COPY --chown=nobody:nobody ./ /var/www/html
WORKDIR /var/www/html
USER nobody

RUN --mount=type=secret,id=composer_auth,target=/home/nobody/.composer/auth.json,uid=65534 \
    composer install --no-dev --optimize-autoloader --no-interaction --no-progress

USER root
RUN apk del composer
USER nobody

Build:

DOCKER_BUILDKIT=1 docker build \
  --secret id=composer_auth,src="$HOME/.composer/auth.json" \
  -t myapp:latest .

Why apk add composer is safe

Composer is packaged in Alpine's official repositories. Installing it with apk is exactly what the upstream Composer image does internally. No curl | sh, no GPG ceremony.

Troubleshooting

Composer could not find a composer.json file in /var/www/html

Cause: Composer ran before composer.json was copied in, or in a different directory. Fix the build order (#40):

COPY --chown=nobody:nobody ./ /var/www/html
WORKDIR /var/www/html
USER nobody
RUN composer install ...

Permission denied writing to vendor/

Cause: Composer is running as root but the source files were already copied with --chown=nobody:nobody, or vice versa. Pick one approach and stick with it:

• Option A — copy as nobody, run Composer as nobody (recommended, shown above).
• Option B — copy as root, run Composer as root, then chown -R nobody:nobody /var/www/html at the end.

Your requirements could not be resolved on ARM

Some platform-specific packages fail on arm/v6 or arm/v7. Use --ignore-platform-reqs only if you know the missing extension is optional for your use case, or cross-compile from an amd64 builder.

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