Deploying a Containerized PHP Application to AWS Using Docker and ECS

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2021-08-18 10:30:04

Since I’ve been playing around with Laravel Envoy, I kept wondering how I could improve the deployment process. For sure it works and I’ve been using it for 6 months or so on a project in production, but having to deal with a physical server has drawbacks I wanted to overcome. For example, the PHP team just released 7.4 packed with cool features I am eager to try. But on a physical server, one has to manually upgrade the PHP version, for each environment and this is a process prone to errors and can lead to different results in different servers. Logistically, the next step was to containerize the application. Because our application is running on an EC2 instance in AWS, I wanted to take advantage of the AWS ecosystem more.

On a high level point of view, this is what I ended up doing: the application is deployed in an ECS cluster running a task that contains a Docker image of the application. This image is stored in ECR. There is an ALB in front of the EC2 instances. The database is stored in RDS. The PHP sessions are stored in a Elasticache memcached server.

This article is dense, because it aims to offer an all-inclusive solution, from your Git repository to the production environment. You do not have to apply everything directly, you can begin by applying some parts and (eventually) do the rest later.