Setup a Magento 2 Development Environment with Docker

It can be very difficult to get a Magento 2 development environment setup quickly & easily. Back in the middle of 2015, I was trying to getting a jump-start on Magento 2 module development, but had a horribly hard time just getting Magento installed (these were the pre-2.0 GM days). I was passively watching a project that was new at the time called Docker, but I really wasn’t familiar with it. It didn’t matter though; I loved the concepts around containerization, and decided this was the path I was moving forward on.

I seriously locked myself in my office for almost a couple months (I was a freelancer working from home at the time, so I was able to do this). I came out to eat, drink and sleep, but that is about it. A few weeks in, I managed to see the home page of Magento 2 (albeit with a ton of JavaScript errors). A week later, I managed to make all of the errors go away, but had some workflow issues with volumes. After a total of six weeks… I was able to develop on Magento 2!

I did take the next day off to play some video games and eat some Chipotle.

Fast-forward almost four years, and my Docker configuration for Magento has almost 500 stars on GitHub (the most of any Magento + Docker repo on GitHub). I’m actually more impressed that it’s been forked more than 200 times — forking typically shows real actual use! The original old images were under the “Mage Inferno” name and were downloaded over 100,000 times. I’m very happy and impressed with these numbers. If it seems as though I’m bragging, it’s because I am. Creating and maintaining a completely free open-source library, one which I am not compensated for or hardly ever receive praise for, is extremely difficult. I’ve given up plenty of family outings and free time to maintain this library, and it’s become a labor of love at this point.

I managed to do a complete rebuild of the filesystem approach this last December, and finally got it to the point where I am truly happy with the result. That said, this approach can be a bit difficult to pickup and implement across all of your team’s projects. I kept hearing the same questions: “How do I use this with my existing project?”, “How can I configure PHP with my own config files?”, or “How do I get started?“. So, I decided to make a completely free screencast course:

This course came out to 20 lessons, all about setting up a development environment for Magento using Docker. It’s a very easy watch at just over 30 minutes of total content.

After posting the link to it on twitter, it immediately got over 50 retweets and 100 likes!

I hope this is just the start of many screencast courses I can make over time. You can signup for the course by clicking here.

If you were just interested in the Docker configuration, feel free to visit the repo on GitHub at https://github.com/markshust/docker-magento/. All GitHub stars️ ⭐️ are appreciated!