Networking & Domains

How the pieces of your stack reach each other, how to swap plain localhost for a real-looking domain, and how to trust your own certificates inside the workspace.

Connect your app to a service

Inside Laradock's network, every container is reachable by its service name used as the hostname. So your application talks to a service by its name, not localhost. In your project's .env:

DB_HOST=mysql
REDIS_HOST=redis
QUEUE_HOST=beanstalkd

The same rule holds for every service: postgres, mongo, elasticsearch, and so on are each reachable at their own name from your app and from inside the workspace. Each service's own service page lists its exact hostname and default port.

From your host machine (a GUI client, a browser, a tool outside Docker), reach the same services at localhost on their published port instead, for example localhost:3306 for MySQL. To go the other way, from inside a container back to something running on your host, use host.docker.internal as the hostname.

Change a service's port

Every service publishes its host port through a variable in your .env, so you never edit a compose file to move a port. To serve MySQL on 3307 instead of the default 3306:

MYSQL_PORT=3307

Restart the service for it to take effect. Each service page lists its own port variable, and they all follow the same <SERVICE>_PORT pattern.

"Port is already in use"

If a container won't start and Docker reports bind: address already in use, something else on your host already holds that port, usually a native install of the same software (a local MySQL or Postgres) or another Laradock project. Two ways out:

• Move Laradock's port. Set a free port in your .env (for example MYSQL_PORT=3307) and connect to that from the host. The container network is unchanged, so DB_HOST=mysql still talks to the service on its standard port.
• Free the port. Stop whatever else is using it. Find the culprit with lsof -i :3306 (macOS/Linux) or netstat -ano | findstr :3306 (Windows).

Use a custom domain

Use a real domain instead of the Docker IP. Assuming your domain is laravel.test:

1. Map it to localhost in your /etc/hosts:

   127.0.0.1    laravel.test

2. Open http://laravel.test.

Optionally set the server name in your NGINX config:

server_name laravel.test;

Add CA certificates

To install your own CA certificates, drop them in the workspace/ca-certificates folder. They're added to the workspace container's system CA store on build.