A few days back I had the need to run Deployer, a deployment tool for PHP, on an isolated container. This was to avoiding keeping it, as a dependency, on a project that needed to be constantly tested on a PHP version not supported by a version of the tool that needed to be run.

I couldn’t simply remove the dependency, because it’s used to deploy the project to production, and I didn’t want to have it installed directly, and globally (using composer), on my computer. So, I simply created a Docker image that would have that tool pre-installed and configured, and simply execute a script that would spin up a container, run the desired command, and then self-remove after the work is done.

After I got it working as expected, I thought it would be useful for others, too, so I published it on Docker Hub. You can get to the page, here.

Now you too can deploy your projects without having to install Deployer either globally on your computer or as a project dependency. The only thing you need is to run the container on the same folder where your deploy.php file is and everything should work as expected.

If you have any questions of feedback, feel free to contact me.