Dockerised PHP running on AWS Lambda

An example setup to run PHP inside a Docker container on AWS Lambda using Bref.

Requirements

• Composer
• Node.js and NPM
• AWS account
• AWS CLI installed and configured with credentials
• A centralised Serverless Framework deployment S3 bucket using the format {aws-account-id}--serverless-deploys

Replace {aws-account-id} with your AWS account ID. Create the bucket with default settings.

Installation

Install NPM and Composer dependencies

npm install

Deployment

Build Docker image, deploy infrastructure and Lambda PHP handler. Appends -dev to resource names

npx serverless deploy

Once deployed the console will output a URL endpoint like below. Open the URL and you should see Hello World output to the screen. If you add the query string ?name=YOUR_NAME to the URL, it will output Hello YOUR_NAME.

Deploying php-docker to stage dev (us-east-1)

✔ Service deployed to stack php-docker-dev (85s)

endpoint: https://ysgw63bbcfifirgzjxws3wgtm40thets.lambda-url.us-east-1.on.aws/
functions:
  handler: php-docker-dev-handler

Deploying to production and staging environments

Deploy infrastructure with a specific stage name appended to resource names. In the example below resources will have -production appended to them.

npx serverless deploy --stage production

Usage

The PHP application is inside the app folder along with the vendor (Composer dependencies) folder. The handler.php file is the event handler called by Lambda. Place all your PHP files in the app folder and call them from the handler.php handler.

Local Development

You can run the Docker container locally (once the image is built) using the following command:

docker run --rm -it --entrypoint= -v ./app:/var/task:ro serverless-php-docker-dev:bref-php-app vendor/bin/bref-local handler.php

You can also pass event parameters by adding the JSON event payload to the end of the command, like this:

docker run --rm -it --entrypoint= -v ./app:/var/task:ro serverless-php-docker-dev:bref-php-app vendor/bin/bref-local handler.php '{"queryStringParameters": {"name": "Jane"}}'

There is also an npm command you can use which is much shorter:

npm run local

and with parameters:

npm run local '{"queryStringParameters": {"name": "Jane"}}'