PHP and Dockers

[NotionCommotion]

Thanks again maxxd,

I think you are correct in your assessment that the benefits provided by dockers are mostly for development, however, considering my experience is about 2% of yours, can't say for sure.  Other than learning about dockers which has been on my list for a while, my primary objective is just to install api-platform along with the React components.  That being said, seems my options are:

1. As you already said, seems like dockers are typically used on a local machine.  I did so on a Windows PC, but it used way too much resources and I don't really want to learn about Dockers on Windows.  I can also create a local Linux machine, and while I would rather not, will probably go this route.
2. Run the dockers on my headless VPS and somehow expose them by Apache on the host.  I thought this would be relatively easy and it works with my simple testing docker, but when used with the api-platform docker, get a "Client sent an HTTP request to an HTTPS server." error when I use http, and a proxy error when using https in the below virtual host.  This issue seems to describe this, however, I think I am going down a bottomless pit and plan on giving up.
3. Deploy the dockers using a Kubernetes Cluster, Docker Compose, Heroku, or Platform.sh as described by the deployment docs.  I assume that this is what you meant when you said "honestly unless you're deploying to a docker instance". Seems like the cart before the horse and will need to get something working first locally first.
4. Don't use Dockers.  I have previously successfully installed just the server component using Symfony and composer, however, there are other components and it seems like implementing them without dockers will be a lot of work and I will also likely still need to fully understand the dockers approach before doing so.

Unless you think differently, I will go the local machine route as you originally recommended.

<VirtualHost *:443>
    ServerName dockers.devserver.net
    ProxyPreserveHost On
    #ProxyRequests off
    #SSLProxyEngine on
    ProxyPass / http://127.0.0.1:8443/
    ProxyPassReverse / http://127.0.0.1:8443/
    #ProxyPass / https://127.0.0.1:8443/
    #ProxyPassReverse / https://127.0.0.1:8443/
    Include /etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-apache.conf
    SSLCertificateFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/api-platform-test.devserver.net/cert.pem
    SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/api-platform-test.devserver.net/privkey.pem
    SSLCertificateChainFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/api-platform-test.devserver.net/chain.pem
</VirtualHost>