Solved! I managed to solve it a couple days ago, but just know I thought I must post it if you’re struggling with it too.
TL;DR: don’t use relative paths!
The “php -S 0.0.0.0:80 -t” command presented was a false lead - it seems every command is truncated for a neater display only, but actually full command is begin run.
Docker logs didn’t show anything meaningful and nothing that I could find in a websearch (after all PHP build in server is not supposed to be used for anything serious and it’s quite under-documented).
The actual cause of the server failing to start is relative path when running docker.
I tried with the following in the docker file:
CMD ["php", "-S", "0.0.0.0:80", "-t", "./public", "./public/index.php"]
and I tried running like this:
docker run -d -v "$PWD":/var/www/app -p 80:80 IMAGE_TAG php -S 0.0.0.0:80 -t ./public ./public/index.php
but the results were the same.
After building the image, I was still able to make it work if done like this:
docker run -it -v "$PWD":/var/www/app -p 80:80 IMAGE_TAG bash
and then from within the container:
php -S 0.0.0.0:80 -t ./public ./public/index.php
but obviously this is not something I was looking for.
After experimenting with various stuff, it just came to me that the reason for failing were the relative paths when invoking php server.
Here’s the working php deamon is I call it for jokes:
FROM php
ENV APP_DIR /app
ENV APPLICATION_ENV development
WORKDIR $APP_DIR
VOLUME $APP_DIR
RUN php -r "copy('https://getcomposer.org/installer', 'composer-setup.php'); \
\$sig = file_get_contents('https://composer.github.io/installer.sig'); \
if (trim(\$sig) === hash_file('SHA384', 'composer-setup.php')) exit(0); \
echo 'ERROR: Invalid installer signature' . PHP_EOL; \
unlink('composer-setup.php'); \
exit(1);" \
&& php composer-setup.php -- --filename=composer --install-dir=/usr/local/bin \
&& rm composer-setup.php
EXPOSE 80
CMD ["php", "-S", "0.0.0.0:80", "-t", "/app/public", "/app/public/index.php"]
Then I just docker build -t phpd . and start it up
docker run -d -p 80:80 -v "$PWD":/app --name my_project phpd
and it works great.
I hope this helps ;]