LEMP

The LEMP stack is a common infrastructure designed to run PHP applications, it is similar to the more well known LAMP (opens new window) stack but replaces Apache (opens new window) with nginx (opens new window) as the web server.

Lando offers a configurable recipe for developing LEMP (opens new window) apps.

Note that this recipe is for a generic LEMP stack. Definitely check out Lando's other recipes before you use this as there may be one designed specifically for use with your framework.

• Getting Started
• Configuration
  • Choosing a php version
  • Choosing a composer version
  • Choosing a database backend
  • Using xdebug
  • Using custom config files
• Connecting to your database
• Importing Your Database
• Tooling

Getting Started

Before you get started with this recipe we assume that you have:

1. Installed Lando and gotten familiar with its basics.
2. Initialized a Landofile for your codebase for use with this recipe.
3. Read about the various services, tooling, events and routing Lando offers.

However, because you are a developer and developers never ever RTFM (opens new window), an example of using the LEMP recipe to run the older CakePHP 2.0 (opens new window) project is shown below:

Note that CakePHP could be any other php framework (opens new window) or your own custom php thing.

# Initialize a LEMP recipe using the latest CakePHP 2.0 version
lando init \
  --source remote \
  --remote-url git://github.com/cakephp/cakephp.git \
  --remote-options="--branch 2.x --depth 1" \
  --recipe lemp \
  --webroot . \
  --name my-first-lemp-app

# Start it up
lando start

# List information about this app.
lando info

Configuration

While Lando recipes set sane defaults so they work out of the box, they are also configurable.

Here are the configuration options, set to the default values, for this recipe's Landofile. If you are unsure about where this goes or what this means we highly recommend scanning the recipes documentation to get a good handle on how the magicks work.

recipe: lemp
config:
  php: '7.3'
  composer_version: '2.0.7'
  webroot: .
  database: mysql:5.7
  xdebug: false
  config:
    server: SEE BELOW
    php: SEE BELOW
    database: SEE BELOW
    vhosts: SEE BELOW

Note that if the above config options are not enough, all Lando recipes can be further extended and overriden.

Choosing a php version

You can set php to any version that is available in our php service. However, you should make sure that whatever framework or custom code you write is designed to work with your choice.

The recipe config to set the LEMP recipe to use php version 5.4 is shown below:

recipe: lemp
config:
  php: '5.4'

Choosing a composer version

You can set composer_version to any version that is available in our php service.

recipe: backdrop
config:
  composer_version: '1.10.1'

Choosing a database backend

By default, this recipe will use the default version of our mysql service as the database backend but you can also switch this to use mariadb or 'postgres' instead. Note that you can also specify a version as long as it is a version available for use with lando for either mysql, mariadb or postgres.

If you are unsure about how to configure the database, we highly recommend you check out the mysql, mariadband 'postgres' services before you change the default.

Using MySQL (default)

recipe: lemp
config:
  database: mysql

Using MariaDB

recipe: lemp
config:
  database: mariadb

Using Postgres

recipe: lemp
config:
  database: postgres

Using a custom version

recipe: lemp
config:
  database: postgres:9.6

Using xdebug

This is just a passthrough option to the xdebug setting that exists on all our php services. The tl;dr is xdebug: true enables and configures the php xdebug extension and xdebug: false disables it.

recipe: lemp
config:
  xdebug: true|false

However, for more information we recommend you consult the php service documentation.

Using custom config files

You may need to override our default LEMP config (opens new window) with your own.

If you do this, you must use files that exist inside your application and express them relative to your project root as shown below:

Note that the default files may change based on how you set both ssl and via. Also note that the vhosts and server config will be explicitly for nginx. We highly recommend you check out the nginx if you plan to use a custom vhosts or server config.

A hypothetical project

Note that you can put your configuration files anywhere inside your application directory. We use a config directory but you can call it whatever you want such as .lando in the example below:

./
|-- config
   |-- default.conf
   |-- my-custom.cnf
   |-- nginx.conf
   |-- php.ini
|-- index.php
|-- .lando.yml

Landofile using custom LEMP config

recipe: lemp
config:
  config:
    server: config/nginx.conf
    vhosts: config/default.conf
    php: config/php.ini
    database: config/my-custom.cnf

Connecting to your database

Lando will automatically set up a database with a user and password and also set an environment variable called LANDO INFO that contains useful information about how your application can access other Lando services.

The default database connection information for a LEMP site is shown below:

Note that the host is not localhost but database.

database: lemp
username: lemp
password: lemp
host: database
# for mysql
port: 3306
# for postgres
# port: 5432

You can get also get the above information, and more, by using the lando info command.

Importing Your Database

Once you've started up your LEMP site, you will need to pull in your database and files before you can really start to dev all the dev. Pulling your files is as easy as downloading an archive and extracting it to the correct location. Importing a database can be done using our helpful lando db-import command.

# Grab your database dump
curl -fsSL -o database.sql.gz "https://url.to.my.db/database.sql.gz"

# Import the database
# NOTE: db-import can handle uncompressed, gzipped or zipped files
# Due to restrictions in how Docker handles file sharing your database
# dump MUST exist somewhere inside of your app directory.
lando db-import database.sql.gz

You can learn more about the db-import command over here

Tooling

By default, each Lando LEMP recipe will also ship with helpful dev utilities.

This means you can use things like drush, composer and php via Lando and avoid mucking up your actual computer trying to manage php versions and tooling.

lando composer          Runs composer commands
lando db-export [file]  Exports database from a service into a file
lando db-import <file>  Imports a dump file into database service
lando mysql|psql        Drops into a MySQL (or psql) shell on a database service
lando php               Runs php commands

Usage examples

# Download a dependency with drush
lando composer require phpunit/phpunit --dev

# Run composer tests
lando db-import dump.sql.gz

# Drop into a mysql shell
lando mysql

# Check hte app's installed php extensions
lando php -m

You can also run lando from inside your app directory for a complete list of commands. This is always advisable as your list of commands may not be 100% the same as above. For example, if you set database: postgres you will get lando psql instead of lando mysql.