Laradock

Laradock is a full PHP development environment for Docker. It packages everything a PHP app needs to run locally, a web server, the PHP runtime, a database, a cache, and dozens of other services, as pre-configured Docker containers, so a developer gets a working environment without installing any of that on their own machine.

It exists because local PHP setup used to mean installing and version-matching PHP, a database, and a web server by hand on every machine, then dealing with "works on my machine" once a teammate's setup drifted. Laradock replaces all of that with containers: every service runs isolated, in its own version, identical for every developer on Linux, macOS, or Windows.

Under the hood, each service, Nginx, MySQL, Redis, Elasticsearch, and 100+ others, lives in its own container defined by Docker Compose, switched on only when a project needs it. A dedicated workspace container holds PHP, Composer, Node, and Git, so all day-to-day development commands run inside Docker instead of the host system. Any PHP version from 5.6 to 8.5 is supported, and the same setup works with Laravel, WordPress, Symfony, Magento, or plain PHP.

At a high level it covers: any PHP version, 100+ ready-made services, an all-in-one dev shell, a simplified command layer over Docker Compose, and a path to ship the same stack straight to production. Free, open-source (MIT), maintained since 2015, used by 100,000+ developers.