Deploying PHP apps to Cloud Foundry

Learn about deploying your PHP apps to Cloud Foundry. If you experience a problem deploying PHP apps, review the Troubleshooting section.

Prerequisites

• Basic PHP knowledge
• Cloud Foundry Command Line Interface (cf CLI) installed on your workstation

A first PHP application

$ mkdir my-php-app
$ cd my-php-app
$ cat << EOF > index.php
<?php
  phpinfo();
?>
EOF
$ cf push my-php-app -m 128M

Change “my-php-app” to a unique name or you may see an error and a failed push.

The previous example creates and pushes a test application to Cloud Foundry.

Here is a breakdown of what happens when you run the example:

• On your workstation…
  • It creates a new directory and one PHP file, which calls phpinfo()
  • Run cf push to push your application. This creates a new application with a memory limit of 128M and uploads our test file.
• On Cloud Foundry…
  • The buildpack detects that your app is a php app
  • The buildpack is run.
    • Application files are copied to the htdocs folder.
  • Apache HTTPD & PHP are downloaded, configured with the buildpack defaults, and run.
  • Your application is accessible at the default route. Run cf app my-php-app to view the url of your new app.

Folder structure

The easiest way to use the buildpack is to put your assets and PHP files into a directory and push it to Cloud Foundry. This way, the buildpack takes your files and moves them into the WEBDIR (defaults to htdocs) folder, which is the directory where your chosen web server looks for the files.

URL rewriting

If you select Apache as your web server, you can include .htaccess files with your application.

Also, you can provide your own Apache or Nginx configurations.

Prevent access to PHP files

The buildpack puts all of your files into a publicly accessible directory. In some cases, you might want to have PHP files that are not publicly accessible but are on the include_path. To do that, create a lib directory in your project folder and place your protected files there.

For example:

$ ls -lRh
total 0
-rw-r--r--  1 daniel  staff     0B Feb 27 21:40 images
-rw-r--r--  1 daniel  staff     0B Feb 27 21:39 index.php
drwxr-xr-x  3 daniel  staff   102B Feb 27 21:40 lib

./lib:
total 0
-rw-r--r--  1 daniel  staff     0B Feb 27 21:40 my.class.php  <-- not public, http://app.cfapps.io/lib/my.class.php == 404

This comes with a catch. If your project legitimately has a lib directory, these files will not be publicly available because the buildpack does not copy a top-level lib directory into the WEBDIR folder. If your project has a lib directory that needs to be publicly available, then you have two options as follows:

Option #1

In your project folder, create an htdocs folder (or whatever you’ve set for WEBDIR). Then move any files that can be publicly accessible into this directory. In the following example, the lib/controller.php file is publicly accessible.

Example:

$ ls -lRh
total 0
drwxr-xr-x  7 daniel  staff   238B Feb 27 21:48 htdocs

./htdocs:  <--  create the htdocs directory and put your files there
total 0
-rw-r--r--  1 daniel  staff     0B Feb 27 21:40 images
-rw-r--r--  1 daniel  staff     0B Feb 27 21:39 index.php
drwxr-xr-x  3 daniel  staff   102B Feb 27 21:48 lib

./htdocs/lib:   <--  anything under htdocs is public, including a lib directory
total 0
-rw-r--r--  1 daniel  staff     0B Feb 27 21:48 controller.php

Given this setup, it is possible to have both a public lib directory and a protected lib directory. The following example demonstrates this setup:

Example:

$ ls -lRh
total 0
drwxr-xr-x  7 daniel  staff   238B Feb 27 21:48 htdocs
drwxr-xr-x  3 daniel  staff   102B Feb 27 21:51 lib

./htdocs:
total 0
-rw-r--r--  1 daniel  staff     0B Feb 27 21:40 images
-rw-r--r--  1 daniel  staff     0B Feb 27 21:39 index.php
drwxr-xr-x  3 daniel  staff   102B Feb 27 21:48 lib

./htdocs/lib:  <-- public lib directory
total 0
-rw-r--r--  1 daniel  staff     0B Feb 27 21:48 controller.php

./lib: <-- protected lib directory
total 0
-rw-r--r--  1 daniel  staff     0B Feb 27 21:51 my.class.php

Option #2

The second option is to pick a different name for the LIBDIR. This is a configuration option that you can set (it defaults to lib). Thus if you set it to something else such as include, your application’s lib directory would no longer be treated as a special directory and it would be placed into WEBDIR (i.e. become public).

Other folders

Beyond the WEBDIR and LIBDIR directories, the buildpack also supports a .bp-config directory and a .extensions directory.

The .bp-config directory exists at the root of your project directory and it is the location of application-specific configuration files. Application-specific configuration files override the default settings used by the buildpack. This link explains application configuration files in depth.

The .extensions directory also exists at the root of your project directory and it is the location of application-specific custom extensions. Application-specific custom extensions allow you, the developer, to override or enhance the behavior of the buildpack. See the php-buildpack README in GitHub for more information about extensions.

Troubleshooting

To troubleshoot problems using the buildpack, you can do one of the following:

1. Review the output from the buildpack. The buildpack writes basic information to stdout, for example the files that it downloads. The buildpack also writes information in the form of stack traces when a process fails.

2. Review the logs from the buildpack. The buildpack writes logs to disk. Follow these steps to access these logs:

   1. SSH into the app container by running:

      cf ssh APP-NAME
      

      Where APP-NAME is the name of your app.

   2. To view the logs, run:

      cat app/.bp/logs/bp.log
      

By default, log files contain more detail than output to stdout. Set the BP_DEBUG environment variable to true for more verbose logging. This instructs the buildpack to set its log level to DEBUG, and to output logs to stdout. Follow Environment Variables documentation to set BP_DEBUG.

Increasing log output with fpm.d

If you use fpm.d, follow these steps to configure fpm to redirect worker stdout and stderr into the logs:

1. Create a file in the .bp-config/php/fpm.d/ directory of your app.

2. Add catch_workers_output=yes to the file you created.

3. Push your app.

For more information about allowed configuration settings in the .bp-config/php/fpm.d directory, see the List of global php-fpm.conf directives.

You can see an example fmp fixture and configuration file in the php-buildpack GitHub repository.