Deploying Laravel 10.x on Serverless Containers

Reviewed on 13 December 2023 • Published on 01 June 2023

serverless
containers
laravel
php
docker
supervisor
nginx
php-fpm
sqs
queue
cockpit

This tutorial provides a step-by-step guide for deploying a containerized Laravel application on the Scaleway cloud platform. It covers the entire process, from setting up the required infrastructure to building and deploying the application using Docker and Scaleway services. The tutorial aims to help developers easily deploy their Laravel applications on Scaleway by providing clear instructions and best practices.

Before you start

To complete the actions presented below, you must have:

A Scaleway account logged into the console
Owner status or IAM permissions allowing you to perform actions in the intended Organization
Installed Docker on your local computer

Why Scaleway is suitable for deploying containerized applications

Scaleway provides a seamless environment for running and managing containers, offering features such as Container Registry, Serverless Containers, Messaging & Queuing and Observability. By combining the benefits of containerization with Scaleway’s platform, developers should be able to easily deploy, scale, and manage their applications efficiently.

Tip

Serverless Containers offers significant advantages when deploying Laravel applications over Serverless Functions, as it provides the flexibility to customize the runtime environment according to your specific needs.

Creating a SQS/SNS queue

Laravel applications make use of queues to process long-running jobs in the background. As this feature of the Laravel framework is nearly always used, we will configure it and leverage the Messaging & Queuing product from Scaleway. The Scaleway documentation provides clear information on how this managed service works and can be configured.

Create a SQS/SNS namespace: we will create a SQS/SNS namespace in the PAR region.
Create a queue. In this example, we create a Standard queue (At-least-once delivery, the order of messages is not preserved) with the default parameters. This queue will be the default queue used by our application.
Generate credentials. In this example, we generate the credentials with read and write access.

Building the Laravel Docker Image

In this section, we will focus on building the containerized image. With Docker, we have a convenient way to package our application along with its dependencies and configurations, ensuring consistency and portability across different environments.

Create the Dockerfile: we create a Dockerfile which is a text file that contains instructions for Docker to build the image. In this example, we specify the base image as php:fpm-alpine, install and enable the necessary php dependencies with install-php-extensions, and determine the commands to be executed at startup.
```
# Dockerfile
FROM --platform=linux/amd64 php:8.2.6-fpm-alpine3.18
ARG IPE_GD_WITHOUTAVIF=1
ADD https://github.com/mlocati/docker-php-extension-installer/releases/latest/download/install-php-extensions /usr/local/bin/
RUN chmod +x /usr/local/bin/install-php-extensions && \
    install-php-extensions bcmath gd gettext intl mcrypt mysqli opcache pcntl pdo_mysql pdo_pgsql soap sockets redis xsl zip
RUN apk --update add \
    supervisor \
    nginx &&\
    rm /var/cache/apk/*
COPY --chown=www-data:www-data . /var/www/html
COPY stubs/nginx /etc/nginx
COPY stubs/php /usr/local/etc
COPY stubs/supervisor /etc/supervisor
RUN mkdir -p /var/run/php
RUN php artisan config:cache
EXPOSE 80
CMD ["/usr/bin/supervisord", "-c", "/etc/supervisor/conf.d/supervisord.conf"]
```
Create the supervisor configuration file. Supervisor is a reliable and efficient process control system for managing and monitoring processes. This is used as there are multiple processes running within the container. In this example, we create a stubs/supervisor/supervisord.conf file with the following configuration to start the web server Nginx, the php-fpm pool, and 5 workers:
```
# stubs/supervisor/supervisord.conf
[supervisord]   
nodaemon=true
logfile=/dev/null
logfile_maxbytes=0
pidfile=/run/supervisord.pid
[program:php-fpm]
command=php-fpm -F
stdout_logfile=/dev/stdout
stdout_logfile_maxbytes=0
stderr_logfile=/dev/stderr
stderr_logfile_maxbytes=0
autorestart=false
startretries=0
[program:nginx]
command=nginx -g 'daemon off;'
stdout_logfile=/dev/stdout
stdout_logfile_maxbytes=0
stderr_logfile=/dev/stderr
stderr_logfile_maxbytes=0
autorestart=false
startretries=0
[program:worker]
process_name=%(program_name)s_%(process_num)02d
command=php /var/www/html/artisan queue:work sqs --sleep=3 --tries=3 --max-time=3600
stdout_logfile=/dev/stdout
stdout_logfile_maxbytes=0
stderr_logfile=/dev/stderr
stderr_logfile_maxbytes=0
autostart=true
autorestart=true
stopasgroup=true
killasgroup=true
user=www-data
numprocs=5
stopwaitsecs=3600
```

Create web server configuration files. Nginx will be used to serve the static assets and to forward the requests to the php-fpm pool for processing. In this example, we create the following configuration files stubs/nginx/http.d/default.conf and stubs/nginx/nginx.conf.

# stubs/nginx/http.d/default.conf
server {
    listen 80;
    listen [::]:80;
    server_name _;
    root /var/www/html/public;
    add_header X-Frame-Options "SAMEORIGIN";
    add_header X-Content-Type-Options "nosniff";
    index index.php;
    charset utf-8;
    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
    }
    location = /favicon.ico { access_log off; log_not_found off; }
    location = /robots.txt  { access_log off; log_not_found off; }
    error_page 404 /index.php;
    location ~ \.php$ {
        fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php8.2-fpm.sock;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $realpath_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        include fastcgi_params;
    }
    location ~ /\.(?!well-known).* {
        deny all;
    }
}

# stubs/nginx/nginx.conf
error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log notice;
events {
    worker_connections 1024;
}
http {
    default_type application/octet-stream;
    gzip on;
    include /etc/nginx/mime.types;
    include /etc/nginx/http.d/*.conf;
    keepalive_timeout 65;
    log_format main '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local "$request" ' '$status $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" ' '"$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for"';
    access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log  main;
    sendfile on;
}
pid /var/run/nginx.pid;
user nginx;
worker_processes auto;

Create the php-fpm configuration file. The configuration stubs/php/php-fpm.d/zz-docker.conf file should be created, and the php-fpm pool configured to render the dynamic pages of the Laravel application. Depending on the needs of your application, you might have to fine-tune the configuration of the process manager. Further information is available in the php manual.
```
[global]
daemonize = no
[www]
listen = /var/run/php/php8.2-fpm.sock
listen.owner = www-data
listen.group = www-data
listen.mode = 0660
pm = dynamic 
pm.max_children = 75 
pm.start_servers = 10 
pm.min_spare_servers = 5 
pm.max_spare_servers = 20 
pm.process_idle_timeout = 10s
```

Build the docker image.

docker build -t my-image .

Creating Container Registry

Create a Scaleway Container Registry namespace in the PAR region. Set the visibility to Private to avoid having your container retrieved without proper authentication and authorization.
Run the following command in your local terminal to log in to the newly created Container Registry.
```
docker login rg.fr-par.scw.cloud/namespace-zen-feistel -u nologin --password-stdin <<< "$SCW_SECRET_KEY"
```
Important
To run this example, create an API key in the API keys tab of your Identity and Access Management dashboard. Then, replace the expression $SCW_SECRET_KEY with the secret key element of the API key. Create an API key

Tag the image and push it to the Container Registry namespace.

docker tag my-image rg.fr-par.scw.cloud/namespace-zen-feistel/my-image:v1
docker push rg.fr-par.scw.cloud/namespace-zen-feistel/my-image:v1

Deploying the Serverless Container

The Scaleway documentation website provides a Quickstart on how to create and manage a Serverless Container Namespace.

Create a Serverless Containers namespace. In this example, we create the my-laravel-application namespace and configure the environment variables and secrets necessary for our application. In particular, we must add all the variables needed to connect to the previously created SQS/SNS queue.

By default, Laravel expects the following environment variables/secrets to be filled in for queues: AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID, AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY, AWS_DEFAULT_REGION, QUEUE_CONNECTION, SQS_PREFIX and SQS_QUEUE.
Deploy the application. Click + Deploy a Container once the namespace is created, and follow the instructions of the creation wizard. Select the registry namespace and the previously uploaded Docker image and configure the listening port (Nginx web server is listening on port 80). For the CPU and memory, define at least 560mVPCU and 256 MB respectively. To reduce the limitations due to cold start, we will run at least 1 instance.

Review the logs to confirm that our application is running as expected, and review the logs to check if the supervisor started and spawned nginx, php-fpm, and workers. This step is optional.

INFO spawned: 'worker_00' with pid 4
INFO spawned: 'php-fpm' with pid 3
INFO spawned: 'nginx' with pid 2
INFO supervisord started with pid 1

Customizing the endpoint name (optionally)

Serverless Containers come with a default endpoint name. You can customize this to a name of your choice using the Endpoints feature.

Click the Endpoints tab. The endpoint information displays.
Click + Add new Endpoints. A pop-up displays.
Enter the name of your endpoint. You can use any domain or subdomain that you already own. Click Add Endpoint to validate.

A new endpoint displays in the list of endpoints. You can now access the application using your custom endpoint name.

Enabling monitoring and load testing (optionally)

By default, some metrics will be available in the Scaleway console. However, to better understand how your application behaves under load, you can use Scaleway Cockpit.

To test the load on the application, there is a basic test route that pushes a job into the queue and returns the welcome page.

# routes/web.php
use App\Jobs\ProcessPodcast;
Route::get('/test', function () {
    ProcessPodcast::dispatch();
    return view('welcome');
});

The job does nothing but wait for a couple of seconds.

# app/Jobs/ProcessPodcast
class ProcessPodcast implements ShouldQueue
{
    public function handle(): void
    {
        sleep(2);
    }
}

Then, use hey to send 400 requests (20 concurrent requests) to this route.

hey -n 400 -q 20 https://example.com/test

We can see that our deployment is not sufficiently sized to handle such workload and the response times are far from ideal.

Response time histogram:
  0.032 [1]     |
  1.890 [280]   |■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■
  3.747 [8]     |■
  5.605 [14]    |■■
  7.463 [3]     |
  9.321 [2]     |
  11.179 [3]    |
  13.037 [9]    |■
  14.894 [40]   |■■■■■■
  16.752 [8]    |■
  18.610 [6]    |■
Status code distribution:
  [200] 155 responses
  [502] 219 responses

However, in the background, the infrastructure starts to scale up and the number of containers becomes enough to handle new requests.

Relaunch the test to confirm that all requests have succeeded thanks to autoscaling.

Response time histogram:
  0.089 [1]     |
  0.366 [174]   |■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■
  0.643 [115]   |■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■
  0.920 [36]    |■■■■■■■■
  1.197 [18]    |■■■■
  1.474 [17]    |■■■■
  1.751 [12]    |■■■
  2.029 [4]     |■
  2.306 [14]    |■■■
  2.583 [3]     |■
  2.860 [6]     |■
  Status code distribution:
  [200] 400 responses

Check the Messaging SQS overview within Cockpit to also confirm that all jobs have been handled correctly and that the queue is now empty.