moodle-php-apache: A Moodle PHP Environment

A Moodle PHP environment configured for Moodle development based on Official PHP Images.

Version

PHP Version	Variant	Tags	Status
PHP 8.1	Bookworm	8.1, 8.1-bookworm

For a complete list of supported versions, look to the master README.

Example usage

The following command will expose the current working directory on port 8080:

$ docker run --name web0 -p 8080:80  -v $PWD:/var/www/html moodlehq/moodle-php-apache:7.1

Features

• Preconfigured with all php extensions required for Moodle development and all database drivers
• Serves wwroot configured at /var/www/html/
• For PHP 7.3 and up, both linux/amd64 and linux/arm64 images are being built. Note that linux/arm64 doesn't support the sqlsrv and oci extensions yet. Other than that, both architectures work exactly the same.
• Verified by automated tests.
• Autobuilt from GHA, on push.
• Support for entrypoint scripts and PHP Configuration
• Many common extensions available

Directories

To facilitate testing and easy setup the following directories are created and owned by www-data by default:

• /var/www/moodledata
• /var/www/phpunitdata
• /var/www/behatdata
• /var/www/behatfaildumps

Initialisation scripts

If you would like to do additional initialization, you can add one or more *.sh, or *.ini scripts under /docker-entrypoint.d (creating the directory if necessary). When the entrypoint script is called, it will run any executable *.sh script, source any non-executable *.sh scripts found in that directory, and will copy any *.ini scripts into the PHP Configuration directory (/usr/local/etc/php/conf.d).

For example, to configure PHP to support a higher upload_max_filesize option you might add the following to a config/10-uploads.ini file:

; Specify a max filesize of 200M for uploads.
upload_max_filesize = 200M
post_max_size = 210M

When starting your container you could do so passing in the config directory:

docker run \
    --name web0 \
    -p 8080:80 \
    -v $PWD/moodle:/var/www/html
    -v $PWD/config:/docker-entrypoint.d \
    moodle-php-apache:latest

These initialization files will be executed in sorted name order as defined by the current locale, which defaults to en_US.utf8.

PHP Configuration

As a lightweight alternative to a full PHP configuration file, you can specify a set of prefixed environment variables when starting your container with these variables turned into ini-format configuration.

Any environment variable whose name is prefixed with PHP_INI- will have the prefix removed, and will be added to a new ini file before the main command starts.

docker run \
    --name web0 \
    -p 8080:80 \
    -v $PWD/moodle:/var/www/html
    -e PHP_INI-upload_max_filesize=200M \
    -e PHP_INI-post_max_size=210M \
    moodle-php-apache:latest

Extensions

The following extensions are inluded as standard:

• apcu
• exif
• gd
• igbinary
• intl
• ldap
• memcached
• mysqli
• opcache
• pcntl
• pcov
• pgsql
• redis
• soap
• solr
• sqlsrv
• timezonedb
• uuid
• xdebug
• xhprof
• xmlrpc-beta
• xsl
• zip

All of the above extensions are enabled by default, except for:

• pcov
• xdebug
• xhprof

Enabling optional extensions

Several extensions are installed, but not enabled. You can enable them easily.

xdebug

The xdebug extension can be enabled by specifying the following environment variable when starting the container:

PHP_EXTENSION_xdebug=1

xhprof

The xdebug extension can be enabled by specifying the following environment variable when starting the container:

PHP_EXTENSION_xhprof=1

pcov

The pcov extension is typically not used in the web UI, but is widely used for code coverage generation in unit testing.

It can be enabled by specifying the following environment variable when starting the container:

PHP_INI-pcov.enabled=1

See also

This container is part of a set of containers for Moodle development, see also:

• moodle-docker a docker-composer based set of tools to get Moodle development running with zero configuration
• moodle-db-mssql Microsoft SQL Server for Linux configured for Moodle development
• moodle-db-oracle Oracle XE configured for Moodle development