Experiences with the Docker TYPO3 Boilerplate
A classical situation: Caused by some misconfiguration on a server a friends website got down. To solve the problem in long-term we decided to move the TYPO3 installation to a specialised and managed hosting company.
But for moving the website we had to do an update of TYPO3 as well and I had the need to setup a development environment. My former setup on my local machine was gone through several OS updates and so on. And to make it even harden, we needed two different setups - one for the old system and one for the updated TYPO3 with newer PHP and MySQL versions.
So as I am using docker anyway at other projects, this seemed the best way - even if I was afraid to waste much time for setting up a clean docker environment.
But with the Docker TYPO3 Boilerplate it was just easy. And I was able to switch to nginx instead of apache and upgrade PHP an MySQL with no effort. In sum the docker setup did cost me less time as setting up a local development environment on my notebook and this time the setup keeps stable for later use.
Additionally I improved my git structure the way, I use an environment repository for the Boilerplate essence and some git submodules for the TYPO3 source and third party extensions. Within the app folder the source and the local extensions are simply linked by symlinks. The project specific template extension got a separate repository, which includes nothing as the template itself and is used as submodule of the environment repository as well. For production releases without docker it’s only needed to update the extension or to git pull on the extension repository.
Just great.