Dockerize Laravel: The Full Stack — FPM, Queues, Scheduler, Redis

Laravel runs on at least three processes in production: the web server (FPM), queue workers, and the task scheduler. Without containers, these are managed with Supervisor configs, cron entries, and systemd units that drift between environments.

Dockerizing Laravel means each concern gets its own container from the same image. The web container runs FPM, the worker container runs php artisan queue:work, and the scheduler container runs php artisan schedule:run in a loop. Same code, same extensions, same config — different entrypoints.

Single multi-stage Dockerfile, multiple Compose services:

• Dockerfile: FROM php:8.3-fpm-alpine with Composer multi-stage (COPY --from=composer:2 /usr/bin/composer /usr/bin/composer). Installs extensions, runs composer install --no-dev --optimize-autoloader, builds frontend assets with a Node.js build stage if needed.
• Compose services: app (PHP-FPM), nginx (web server), worker (same image, command: php artisan queue:work --sleep=3 --tries=3), scheduler (same image, runs cron or schedule:run in a loop), redis, postgres.

The entrypoint script runs php artisan config:cache, route:cache, view:cache, and migrate --force on startup. Environment variables are loaded from .env via Compose env_file.

• Single Dockerfile used by web, worker, and scheduler containers
• docker-compose.yml with Nginx, PHP-FPM, Redis, Postgres, worker, and scheduler
• Entrypoint script with migration, cache warming, and storage linking
• Horizon dashboard config (if using Horizon instead of raw queue:work)
• OPcache and FPM tuning for production load
• CI/CD pipeline with Composer and npm cache layers