I have decided to start with Laravel as it seems to be the most popular currently. From what I have learned from starting their boot camp, I can see why. Though it kind of frustrates me a bit which I will explain. It seems to be a big ecosystem involved with it. They have embraced AI and have added their own cloud system as well. It is a bit overwhelming, coming from a guy that prefers to host his own projects. Digging in a bit and looking past all of the external pieces, it does look like you can build an application with it and still host it locally. Though using their installer kind of wants you to use other things in their arsenal.
So after figuring out my base docker file. I decided to make use of the Laravel installer. It was a bit of a pain to install inside the docker container. While I admit I a bit green on docker, I know the basics and I even tried to add the installation of the installer to the docker file. I just couldn't figure out where it installed it. Though now that I think about it, it is probably in the root home directory in the composer vendor directory. Which of course is not in the path and no access from the user that I run the docker container in.
So have had to go with plan B. I installed the installer in the root directory of the my project, thinking I can just have it there while I build the application around it. I did get it installed and even had it put it in a bin directory in the project. It seems to be able to run, however in order to have it generate a starter project it needs to build it in a sub-directory(which is not ideal). Even when I went up a directory to have build the start project in the root project directory, it erased all of my files (including the .git directory and my docker files) to build the project (WTF!!). I get it, it is meant to be used in their cloud or in a server that runs PHP, and not a docker container. This is just unacceptable.
So for now I am setting up the boot camp project in a sub-directory of my project. I might look at bring things up a level if I need to later on. For now I am looking at learning the ins and outs of how Laravel implements things. From what I have seen so far it seems similar, yet different, to Laminas.