Docker: Nginx and php5-fpm dockers are not talking

Question

I’d like to make a fully dockerized Drupal install. My first step is to get containers running with Nginx and php5-fpm, both Debian based. I’m on CoreOS alpha channel (using Dig

Answer 1

The reason it doesn't work is, as you have discovered yourself, that nginx only sends the path of the PHP file to PHP-FPM, not the file itself (which would be quite inefficient). The solution is to use a third, data-only VOLUME container to host the files, and then mount it on both docker instances.

FROM debian
VOLUME /var/www
CMD ['true']

Build the above Dockerfile and create an instance (call it for example: storage-www), then run both the nginx and the PHP-FPM containers with the option:

--volumes-from storage-www

That will work if you run both containers on the same physical server. But you still could use different servers, if you put that data-only container on a networked file-system, such as GlusterFS, which is quite efficient and can be distributed over a large-scale network.

Hope that helps.

Update:

As of 2015, the best way to make persistent links between containers is to use docker-compose.