How to Dockerize a Laravel 11 and React 18 Application for Development

Introduction

Docker has become a popular choice for development environments due to its ability to containerize applications and simplify deployment across different systems. This guide will walk you through dockerizing a Laravel 11 backend and React 18 frontend application, using Docker Compose to orchestrate multiple services. We wil assume that your laravel and react apps live in seperate folders and will be served through different domain. Suffice to say that the react app will not be served from the laravel backend but will use the laravel backend only as an api service.