Documentation
Local development

Local development

It is possible to run web applications (running with the FPM runtime) locally.

💡

To run event-driven functions locally, read Local development for event-driven functions instead.

The simple way

To keep things simple, you can run your applications locally like you did without Bref.

With Laravel, run HTTP applications locally using php artisan serve, Laravel Valet (opens in a new tab), or Laravel Sail (opens in a new tab).

You can test CLI commands locally by running them in your terminal using php artisan my-command.

Docker

In order to run the application locally in an environment closer to production, you can run your application using the Bref Docker images (opens in a new tab). For example, create the following docker-compose.yml:

docker-compose.yml
version: "3.5"
 
services:
    app:
        image: bref/php-81-fpm-dev:2
        ports: [ '8000:8000' ]
        volumes:
            - .:/var/task
        environment:
            HANDLER: public/index.php
            # Assets will be served from this directory
            DOCUMENT_ROOT: public

You can then run:

docker-compose up

The application will be available at http://localhost:8000/ (opens in a new tab).

The HANDLER environment variable lets you define which PHP file will be handling all HTTP requests. This should be the same handler that you have defined in serverless.yml for your HTTP function.

Currently, the Docker image support only one PHP handler. If you have multiple HTTP functions in serverless.yml, you can duplicate the service in docker-compose.yml to have one container per lambda function.

Read-only filesystem

The code will be mounted in /var/task, just like in Lambda. But in Lambda, /var/task is read-only.

When developing locally, it is common to regenerate cache files on the fly (for example Symfony or Laravel cache). You have 2 options:

  • either mount the whole codebase as writable (per the example above):

    docker-compose.yml
            volumes:
            - .:/var/task

  • or mount a specific cache directory as writable (better):

    docker-compose.yml
            volumes:
            - .:/var/task:ro
            - ./storage:/var/task/storage

Assets

If you want to serve assets locally, you can define a DOCUMENT_ROOT environment variable:

docker-compose.yml
services:
    app:
        # ...
        environment:
            HANDLER: public/index.php
            # Assets will be served from this directory
            DOCUMENT_ROOT: public

In the example above, a public/assets/style.css file will be accessible at http://localhost:8000/assets/style.css.

💡

Be aware that serving assets in production will not work like this out of the box. You will need to use an S3 bucket.

Console commands

You can run console commands in Docker via:

# Laravel (artisan)
docker-compose run app php artisan ...
 
# Symfony (bin/console)
docker-compose run app php bin/console ...

Xdebug

The development container (bref/php-<version>-fpm-dev) comes with Xdebug pre-installed.

To enable it, create a php/conf.dev.d/php.ini file in your project containing:

php/conf.dev.d/php.ini
zend_extension=xdebug.so

Now start the debug session by issuing a request to your application in the browser (opens in a new tab).

Xdebug and MacOS

Docker for Mac uses a virtual machine for running docker. That means you need to use a special host name (host.docker.internal) that is mapped to the host machine's IP address.

Edit the php/conf.dev.d/php.ini file:

php/conf.dev.d/php.ini
zend_extension=xdebug.so
 
[xdebug]
xdebug.remote_enable = 1
xdebug.remote_autostart = 0
xdebug.remote_host = 'host.docker.internal'

Blackfire

The development container (bref/php-<version>-fpm-dev) comes with the blackfire (opens in a new tab) extension. When using docker compose, you can add the following service for the blackfire agent:

docker-compose.yml
services:
    blackfire:
        image: blackfire/blackfire
        environment:
            BLACKFIRE_SERVER_ID: server-id
            BLACKFIRE_SERVER_TOKEN: server-token

In order to enable the probe you can create a folder php/conf.dev.d in your project and include an ini file enabling blackfire:

php/conf.dev.d/php.ini
extension=blackfire
blackfire.agent_socket=tcp://blackfire:8707

For more details about using blackfire in a docker environment see the blackfire docs (opens in a new tab)

Deploying with AWS CDKEvent-driven functions