Local development setup with FrankenPHP + MariaDB + Docker

[postadelmaga]

Hi,
After many years I try to get back on Magento, I am bit rusty and many things has changed in PHP and dev/sys admin stuff (Docker, composer, new webserver ... )

Why

Since I cannot find many info related to OpenMage for the following setup, I share my fatigue fruit in case it can help others or inspire some official documentation for this use case

What

I put together a minimal Docker setup for running OpenMage locally using two containers:

• FrankenPHP (Caddy + PHP 8.3 Alpine, handling both the web server and PHP)
• MariaDB LTS

It includes:

• local HTTPS via Caddy's tls internal
• Xdebug 3
• OpenMage via Composer

All files and instructions are in this gist: https://gist.github.com/postadelmaga/36cc134b136a348834355274a35bcdf3

Happy to hear feedback or suggestions.

Credit: Claude and Gemini :)

[sreichel]

Thanks for sharing.

We have a docker setup at dev/openmage maintained by @colinmollenhour.

See https://docs.openmage.org/developers/tools/oneline/#docker-compose

[colinmollenhour]

Hi @postadelmaga your overall approach seems similar to the one that is in the repo mentioned by Sven. In fact the install.sh is almost the same, so maybe it was picked up by your coding agent, and you didn't even realize it?

Some things to consider:

• Replacing nginx+php-fpm with FrankenPHP is fine if there is a benefit to it - if it's not using Worker mode, I'm not sure there is any benefit. Having Worker mode work out of the box would be very interesting, though.
• I used nip.io to avoid having to edit the /etc/hosts file as requiring the user to do it is somewhat clunky, in my opinion
• It is best practice to move the admin to a different url so I like splitting these on the initial setup to avoid encouraging bad practice
• Security by design is key - does this architecture prevent executing arbitrary files as PHP code, for example? Does it protect static files like app/etc/local.xml?
• Did you check other scripts like get.php, api.php, etc?

[postadelmaga]

Hi @colinmollenhour,

Thanks for pointing out the security concerns and the separate admin URL — I'll implement both.
install.sh
I found it yesterday and asked Claude to adapt it to the setup procedure (including phpMyAdmin). This happened after my previous message, hence no mention of it there.

Why FrankenPHP

1. Maho migration path — you guys suggested it for Maho, and since I'm planning to move from OpenMage eventually, adopting it now avoids changing too many things at once.
   (I am actually recovering/updating a Magento 1.9.x with several custom modules to OpenMage)
2. Reduced stack complexity: single binary, 2 processes, Go-based (ARM-friendly), built-in SSL and so simpler than the classic Nginx/Apache + PHP-FPM + Certbot stack.
3. Worker mode — the main reason for the choice and a future implementation is on the table, at least for config.xml caching.
   Is there already an open discussion about this on the Maho repo? I'd like to contribute once I have a better grasp of the codebase.

While "developing" this script I also found the DDEV but that doesn't offer FrankenPHP and I don't know much about Docker so I preferred to start from scratch

[sreichel]

There is a ddev addon, pls check https://ddev.com/blog/using-frankenphp-with-ddev/

[postadelmaga]

in the meanwhile I added:

• nip.io in the installer.sh
• a different url for admin
• some secury setting in the Caddy config

@sreichel
thanks for the hint, I will probably switch to ddev for local and use this setup as a base for a future production/staging server config