FAST Docker development environment with Magento2 on MacBook with High Sierra

For a long time i was really really really very frustrated because of Docker, Magento2 and High Sierra. If you search for that you will find a lot of tutorials how to speed up your development environment. At the beginning the page load sometimes was over 1 minute, also when you know what to do this is a really long time to wait for a short test. Later after some Docker updates the waiting time get’s down to 20-30 seconds for one page load. And now i have page load times between 2 and 3 seconds on a single frontend page without layout, block and fpc cache. With that i can focus on development!

And here is, how you can get this too

System requirements

• You are working on a mac with high sierra
• Check that your volume is running on APFS (the new apple file-format)
• You should have at least docker stable Version 17.12.0-ce-mac49 (21995)
• Check that you have docker-compose also installed
• You should have docker-sync installed

Docker configuration

• Open Docker -> Preferences…
• Open Tab “File Sharing”
  > Check that there is only one folder with all your projects, remove all others like tmp etc. (so docker only search here for file changes)
• Open Tab “Disk”
  > Check that the disk image location is ending with Docker.raw
  > If not you have to reset docker to factory defaults (this will drop/delete your containers)
• Open Tab “Advanced”
  > Set CPUs to 4
  > Set Memory at least to 8 GB
• Apply all the changes and check after restart if they are set correct

Check your storage driver

put this in a terminal:

docker info | grep "Storage Driver"

it should output this:

Storage Driver: overlay2

Project configuration with docker-sync and docker-compose

Our project folder structure looks like this:

Add the docker-sync.yml and docker-compose.mac.yml to your project folder (examples see below)

Start docker-sync first (you should be in the project folder, where your docker-sync.yml is)

docker-sync start

Start your docker containers with docker-compose

docker-compose -f docker-compose.mac.yml up -d 

Example docker-sync.yml

version: "2"

options:
  verbose: true
  compose-file-path: 'docker-compose.mac.yml'
  unison_image: 'eugenmayer/unison'
  cli_mode: 'auto'
  max_attempt: 3000

syncs:
  php-projectname-sync:
    notify_terminal: true
    src: './src'
    sync_strategy: 'unison'
    sync_excludes: [
      'Path .git',
      'Name .gitignore',
      'BelowPath node_modules',
      'BelowPath bower_components',
      'BelowPath sass-cache',
      'BelowPath .sass-cache',
      'Path var/cache',
      'Path var/page_cache',
      'Path var/session',
      'BelowPath .DS_Store'
    ]
    sync_userid: '1000'
    max_attempt: 10

  mysql-projectname-sync:
    notify_terminal: true
    src: './.docker/mysql/config/'
    sync_strategy: 'unison'
    sync_prefer: 'src'
    watch_in_container: true

Example docker-compose.mac.yml

version: "2"

services:

  nginx-projectname:
    build: "./.docker/nginx-ubuntu/"
    container_name: "nginx-projectname"
    volumes_from:
      - php-projectname
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "8080:8080"
    expose:
      - "9000"
      - "8080"
    networks:
      - projectname-net

  mysql-projectname:
    image: mysql:5.6
    container_name: "mysql-projectname"
    volumes:
      - mysql-projectname-sync:/etc/mysql/conf.d
    environment:
      MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: "root"
      MYSQL_DATABASE: "projectname_dev"
    ports:
      - "3306:3306"
    expose:
      - "3306"
    networks:
      - projectname-net

  php-projectname:
    build: "./.docker/php-ubuntu/"
    container_name: "php-projectname"
    environment:
      XDEBUG_CONFIG: "remote_host=docker.for.mac.localhost"
      PHP_XDEBUG_ENABLED: 1
      PHP_IDE_CONFIG: "serverName=projectname"
    depends_on:
      - mysql-projectname
      - redis-projectname
    volumes:
      - php-projectname-sync:/var/www/html:nocopy,delegated
    networks:
      - projectname-net

  mailcatcher-projectname:
    image: tophfr/mailcatcher
    container_name: "mailcatcher-projectname"
    ports:
      - "1080:80"
      - "1025:25"
    networks:
      - projectname-net

  redis-projectname:
    image: redis
    container_name: "redis-projectname"
    ports:
      - "6379:6379"
      - "6380:6380"
    expose:
      - "6379"
    networks:
      - projectname-net

  varnish-projectname:
    restart: unless-stopped
    build: ./.docker/varnish
    container_name: "varnish-projectname"
    ports:
      - "6081:6081"
      - "6082:6082"
    depends_on:
      - nginx-projectname
    expose:
      - "6081"
      - "6082"
    networks:
      - projectname-net

  sslterm-projectname:
    build: "./.docker/ssl-term/"
    container_name: "sslterm-projectname"
    depends_on:
      - varnish-projectname
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "80:80"
      - "443:443"
    networks:
      - projectname-net

networks:
  projectname-net:
    driver: bridge

volumes:
  php-projectname-sync:
    external: true
  mysql-projectname-sync:
    external: true

Now open the page in your browser and enjoy the speed!

Links to additional resources

• Performance tuning for volume mounts