I've been working on building PHP Docker images for the purposes of testing, as well as to potentially provide images containing the Swoole extension. This is generally straight-forward, as the official PHP images are well-documented.

This week, I decided to see if I could build Alpine-based images, as they can greatly reduce the final image size. And I ran into a problem.

One of the test-beds I use builds RSS and Atom feeds using zend-feed. When I tried one of these images, I started getting failures like the following:

PHP Warning:  DOMDocument::loadXML(): xmlParseEntityRef: no name in Entity, line: 167 in /var/www/vendor/zendframework/zend-feed/src/Writer/Renderer/Entry/Atom.php on line 404
PHP Fatal error:  Uncaught TypeError: Argument 1 passed to DOMDocument::importNode() must be an instance of DOMNode, null given in /var/www/vendor/zendframework/zend-feed/src/Writer/Renderer/Entry/Atom.php:371
Stack trace:
#0 /var/www/vendor/zendframework/zend-feed/src/Writer/Renderer/Entry/Atom.php(371): DOMDocument->importNode(NULL, 1)
#1 /var/www/vendor/zendframework/zend-feed/src/Writer/Renderer/Entry/Atom.php(53): Zend\Feed\Writer\Renderer\Entry\Atom->_setContent(Object(DOMDocument), Object(DOMElement))
#2 /var/www/vendor/zendframework/zend-feed/src/Writer/Renderer/Feed/Atom.php(91): Zend\Feed\Writer\Renderer\Entry\Atom->render()
#3 /var/www/vendor/zendframework/zend-feed/src/Writer/Feed.php(237): Zend\Feed\Writer\Renderer\Feed\Atom->render()
#4 /var/www/src/Blog/Console/FeedGenerator.php(209): Zend\Feed\Writer\Feed->export('Atom')

During an initial search, this appeared to be a problem due to libxml2 versions, and so I went down a rabbit hole trying to get an older libxml2 version in place, and have all of the various XML extensions compile against it. However, the error persisted.

So, I did a little more sleuthing. I fired up the container with a shell:

$ docker run --entrypoint /bin/sh -it php:7.2-cli-alpine3.8

From there, I used apk to add some editing and debugging tools so I could manually step through some of the code. In doing so, I was able to discover the exact feed item that was causing problems, and, better, get the content it was trying to use.

I realized at that point that the problem was the content — which was being massaged via the tidy extension before being passed to DOMDocument::loadXML(). For some reason, the content generated was not valid XML! (Which is really, really odd, as the whole point of tidy is to produce valid markup!)

I checked the version of ext-tidy, and what version of libtidy it was compiled against, and then checked against the php:7.2-cli image to see what it had, and discovered that while Alpine was using libtidy 5.6.0, the Debian-based image was using 5.2.0. In fact, Ubuntu 18:10 still distributes 5.2.0!

So, I then went on a quest to figure out how to get the earlier libtidy version, and compile the tidy extension against it. This is what I came up with:

### DOCKER-VERSION        1.3.2

FROM php:7.2-cli-alpine3.8

### Compile-time dependencies
RUN echo 'http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.6/community' >> /etc/apk/repositories
RUN apk update && \
  apk add --no-cache 'tidyhtml-dev==5.2.0-r1'

### Install the extension
RUN docker-php-ext-install -j$(nproc) tidy

Once I'd built an image using the above, I tried out my code, and the errors disappeared!

This post mainly exists because my google searches were finding nothing. Hopefully, somebody else who runs into the problem will get something useful going forward!