🐘 Frank

Or the LFDJ Stack (Laravel + FrankenPHP + Docker + Just)

A minimal setup for running a Laravel 12 application with FrankenPHP, Docker, and just for task automation, without you needing to install PHP, Node, FrankenPHP, Composer, etc. Admittedly you still need Docker and Just installed, but I find those an acceptable minimum.

Comes with Mailjet & PostgreSQL 😎

Dockerized Laravel development

Every binary/cli tool you need is directly aliased in the current shell session, mimicking a real tool install. For instance, you may directly run php artisan ... (or artisan ...) commands as they are aliased to docker commands. You can now copy/paste commands directly from the web!

You may even run npm (or bun) commands the way you would normally with locally installed binaries.

To enable this, refer to Use shell aliases.

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📋 Todo:

• Install node dependencies the same way or similar
• Set up database in docker-compose.yml
• Added convenience aliases for QoL (up, down, composer, php, npm, bun, artisan and psql)
• Add various other tools/Laravel plugins?
  • Sail support (easier to manage php versions)
  • Octane out of the box support? (might make dev a bit harder)

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📦 Requirements

• Docker
• just (task runner)

This repo was solely tested on a Fedora 42+ system. I would recommend running this repo either in WSL or macOS.

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🚀 Quick Start

1. Setup

just install

You should run this command right after creating this repository. This will create a full laravel initial installation.

It is important you run this recipe first as to avoid creating a database with wrong credentials (among other things).

2. Use shell aliases

Warning

Ignore this step if you already have the functions up and down in your terminal profile.

To make development easier and add contextual aliases to your shell, you may run:

just shell-setup >> ~/.zshrc # or ~/.bashrc
source ~/.zshrc # or ~/.bashrc

To add two functions up and down.

• up : starts the containers and sources aliases for composer, artisan and psql to the dockerized application
• down: stops the containers and removes the aliases

Tip

These convenient functions will save you a few keystrokes when interacting with your containers. composer here is docker compose exec app composer and artisan is docker compose exec app php artisan.

3. Start the Development Environment

Once the install has completed, you may start the development environment with:

up
# or if you don't have the convenience aliases installed:
just up

This will create the other containers, and run migrations.

You can now visit: http://localhost:8000

🛠 Common Commands

Command	Description
just install	Install Laravel
just up	Start the development environment
just down	Stop containers
just clean	Stop containers and remove volumes
just reset	Deletes all files except core config files

🧰 Included aliases

Alias	Description
up	Start the development environment and source the aliases
down	Stop containers and unset the aliases
deactivate	Unset all aliases
php	Use the dockerized PHP CLI
artisan	Use the dockerized Artisan CLI
composer	Use the dockerized Composer CLI
psql	Use the dockerized postgres CLI
npm	Use the dockerized npm CLI
bun	Use the dockerized bun CLI

Example usages:

• php artisan migrate
• artisan key:generate
• composer require filament/filament:"^4.0"
• bun install
• npm run dev
• psql: connects you inside the postgres instance

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⚠️ Project reset

You can reset the whole repository with just reset. This command is mostly useful is something went bad during install or during template development.

This command deletes everything in the project directory and restores the project back to how it was mostly looking when initially pulled.

You’ll be prompted to confirm before anything is deleted.