Vessel is just a small set of files that sets up a local Docker-based dev environment per project. There is nothing to install globally, except Docker itself!

If you don't have PHP 7+ installed on your host machine, see the docs on I don't have PHP 7 yet (catch-22) for a solution.

Install

To install Vessel into any given Laravel project, simply require it via Composer:

composer require shipping-docker/vessel

If using Laravel <=5.4, register Vessel's service provider (Laravel >=5.5 does this automatically):

// config/app.php

'providers' => [
    // ....
    Vessel\VesselServiceProvider::class,
    // ...
];

Finally, publish the vessel command and Docker files:

php artisan vendor:publish --provider="Vessel\VesselServiceProvider"

Note: You must install Docker to use this project. See Installing Docker for details and supported systems.

Initialize

Getting started is easy - just initialize vessel and start using it.

# Run this once to initialize project
# Must run with "bash" until initialized
bash vessel init

# Start vessel
./vessel start

Because Vessel uses Redis for caching, the init command will install the predis/predis composer package if it is not already present.

Head to http://localhost in your browser and see your Laravel site!

Note 1: Starting Vessel for the first time will download the base Docker images from https://hub.docker.com and build our application container.

This will only need to be run the first time.

Note 2: If you receive an error including EADDRINUSE, you likely already have something listening on port 80 or 3306. This may be a Vagrant virtual machine, or Laravel Valet, but could be anything! See Multiple Environments for a solution.

Note that the EADDRINUSE error is often last in the error output reported from Docker.

See it in action

Here's a quick video on installing and getting started with Vessel, with just a tad more explanation.

Starting and Stopping Vessel

There's only a few commands to know to start or stop your containers. Database and Redis data is saved when you stop and restart Vessel.

Starting Vessel

This will start your containers and listen on port 80 for web requests.

# Start the environment
./vessel start

## This is equivalent to
./vessel up -d

Stopping Vessel

Stopping Vessel will stop the containers and destroy them. They get recreated when you start Vessel back up. Your data (database/cache) is saved between restarts.

# Stop the environment
./vessel stop

## This is equivalent to
./vessel down