# An Experiment with Docker & HHVM

> Experimented with Docker and HHVM for our Drupal7 site at work, achieving a seamless transition and saving significant setup time.

- Canonical: https://www.russ.cloud/2014/11/09/an-experiment-with-docker-hhvm/
- Published: 2014-11-09
- Author: Russ McKendrick
- Tags: Docker, Tools

---

Now the dev team at [work](https://reconnix.com) have moved over to using Docker we decided to have some fun.

An internal system we use is based on [Drupal7](https://www.drupal.org/drupal-7.0), the development version of the site has a [NGINX / PHP 5.4 container](https://github.com/russmckendrick/docker/pkgs/container/php7) running in front of it. We have been hearing alot about [HHVM](http://hhvm.com) so why not try building a container and seeing if it our codebase works?

First off, as I prefer to use [CentOS](/2014/08/03/am-i-an-operating-system-snob/), I needed to find a way of getting HHVM installed which wouldn’t take hours (a build from source can notoriously take hours) as I was on the clock. Luckily for me someone had [pushed a package](https://copr.fedoraproject.org/coprs/no1youknowz/hhvm-repo/) to [Copr](https://copr.fedoraproject.org/coprs/) meaning I could do a yum install and quickly adapt the [Dockerfile](http://docs.docker.com/reference/builder/) I already had in place for PHP 5.4 changing it from ….

```bash frame="terminal" title="An Experiment with Docker & HHVM 1/2"
### Dockerfile
#
# See https://github.com/russmckendrick/docker/

FROM russmckendrick/base:latest
MAINTAINER Russ McKendrick <russ@mckendrick.io>

ADD nginx.repo /etc/yum.repos.d/
RUN yum -y install nginx mariadb php php-fpm php-mysql php-pdo php-devel php-gd php-pecl-memcache php-pspell php-snmp php-xmlrpc php-xml php-mcrypt php-mbstring php-imap php-pecl-xdebug php-pecl-xhprof python-setuptools && yum clean all
RUN easy_install pip && pip install “pip>=1.4,<1.5” - upgrade && pip install supervisor
RUN useradd webserver -u 666 && gpasswd -a webserver apache
ADD conf-supervisord.conf /etc/supervisord.conf
ADD default.conf /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf
RUN curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php && mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer
ADD run /usr/local/bin/
RUN chmod +x /usr/local/bin/run
CMD [“/usr/local/bin/run”]
```


…. to ….

```bash frame="terminal" title="An Experiment with Docker & HHVM 2/2"
### Dockerfile
#
# See https://github.com/russmckendrick/docker/

FROM russmckendrick/base:latest
MAINTAINER Russ McKendrick <russ@mckendrick.io>

ADD nginx.repo /etc/yum.repos.d/
ADD hhvm.repo /etc/yum.repos.d/
RUN yum -y install yum-plugin-replace
RUN yum -y install nginx mariadb hhvm python-setuptools postfix gcc make && yum clean all
RUN easy_install pip && pip install “pip>=1.4,<1.5” - upgrade && pip install supervisor
RUN groupadd apache && useradd webserver -u 666 && gpasswd -a webserver apache && mkdir -p /var/www/html/ && chown -R webserver:webserver /var/www/html/
ADD index.php /var/www/html/
ADD conf-supervisord.conf /etc/supervisord.conf
ADD default.conf /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf
ADD run /usr/local/bin/
RUN chmod +x /usr/local/bin/run
CMD [“/usr/local/bin/run”]
```


…. and hey presto a working HHVM image. Now all we had to do was change the reference to the container being pulled down in the [fig.yml](http://www.fig.sh/yml.html) file for the project. After doing a fig stop and then fig rm we did a fig up -d and waited ….

<Img src="/assets/2014-11-09-an-experiment-with-docker-hhvm/img/2014-11-09_an-experiment-with-docker-hhvm_1.jpg" alt="docker-success_x7gdrq" />

…. yep, it just worked. Within 30 minutes we had decided to try HHVM, built a Docker Image and put it in-front of our codebase.

Due to actually needing to get on with some work we could not do much in-depth testing and simply put the PHP 5.4 container back in front of the codebase.

To achieve this without Docker it would have meant taking the following steps ….

- Commission a new Dev VM
- Install the new software stack
- Configure the new software stack
- Copy the codebase and database backup to the new VM
- Test, play then remove VM

…. all of which would have taken a good few hours of back & forth with the development and operations team.

Finally, this seems as a good as place as any to embed a copy of a presentation I have produced on how we at [Reconnix](https://reconnix.com) are using Docker ….

<iframe src="https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/key/pYMSWveXdwD1sn" width="595" height="485" frameborder="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" scrolling="no" style="border:1px solid #CCC; border-width:1px; margin-bottom:5px; " allowfullscreen> </iframe>