The Internet is teeming with services you can take advantage of. You can store your files in the cloud, share movies, organize photo collections, talk with friends, manage your projects and so on. It also means that your data is stored outside your computer and you don’t have full control over it.

You may use self-hosted counterparts of services. Instead of accepting vague privacy policies, you may set the rules. However, you are fully responsible for sustaining your data.

I used to consider self-hosted services as a privacy-respective and cheap alternatives of popular services. The former is true, however, the latter factor is often far-fetched.

I remember this time when I discovered Vagrant. The magic behind this tool and the general idea of scaffolding the whole environment using single command was pretty genius. Moreover, I had programmed on Windows and thankfully I could get rid of the XAMP and any other Windows-oriented web server packages.

In my previous job, my boss showed me a tool called Docker. I instantaneously got the point of the concept behind it and I started exploring the big universe of the possibilities of use. In this article, I’m going to show the most common use-case for docker – a proposed local environment suited for PHP application development.

This article is devoted to the configuration rather than explanation what the Docker really is. I would like to show the actual use-case rather than showing my point of view – I’ll follow it in one of the next articles.