When running Nginx + PHP-FPM in two different containers, can that configuration ever work without sharing a code volume? – Docker

I have the following docker-compose.yaml file for local development that works without issue:

• Nginx container just runs the webserver with an upstream pointing to php
• Php runs just php-fpm + my extensions
• I have an external docker-sync volume which contains my code base which is shared with both nginx + php.
• The entire contents of my application is purely PHP returning a bunch of json api data. No static assets get served up.

version: '3.9'

networks:
  backend:
    driver: bridge

services:
  site:
    container_name: nginx
    depends_on: [php]
    image: my-nginx:latest
    networks: [backend]
    ports: ['8080:80', '8081:443']
    restart: always
    volumes: [code:/var/www/html:nocopy]
    working_dir: /var/www/html

  php:
    container_name: php
    image: my-php-fpm:latest
    networks: [backend]
    ports: ['9000:9000']
    volumes: [code:/var/www/html:nocopy]
    working_dir: /var/www/html

volumes:
  code:
    external: true

I’m playing around with ways to deploy this in my production infrastructure and am liking AWS ECS for it. I can create a single task definition, that launches a single service with both containers defined (and both sharing a code volume that I add in during my build process) and the application works.

This solution seems odd to me because now the only way my application can scale out is by giving me a {php + nginx} container set each time. My PHP needs are going to scale faster than my nginx ones, so this strikes me as a bit wasteful.

I’ve tried experimenting with the following setup:

• 1 ECS service for just nginx
• 1 different ECS service for just php
• Both are load balanced, but by virtue of using Fargate and them being on different services, I don’t have a way to add a volumesFrom block on the nginx container that would give it access to my code (which I package on the PHP container during my build process). There is no reference to the PHP docker container that I can make that allows this to happen.

My configuration "works" in that the load balanced Nginx service can now scale independent of the load balanced PHP service. They’re able to both talk to each other. But Nginx not having my code means it can’t help but return a 404 on anything that I want my php upstream to handle.

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name localhost;

    root /var/www/html/public;
    index index.php index.html;

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
    }

    location /health {
        access_log off;
        return 200 'PASS';
        add_header Content-Type text/plain;
    }

    location ~ .php$ {
        try_files $uri =404;
        fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+.php)(/.+)$;
        fastcgi_pass app-upstream;
        fastcgi_index index.php;
        include fastcgi_params;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $fastcgi_path_info;
        proxy_http_version 1.1;
        proxy_set_header   "Connection" "";
    }
}

Is there any nginx configuration I can write that would make this setup (without nginx having access to my code) work?

It feels like my only options are either copying the same code onto both containers (which feels weird), combining them both into the same container (which violates the 1 service/1 container rule), or accepting that I can’t scale them as independently as I would like (which is not the end of the world).