Two common pitfalls when running CLI tools like Docker from a Laravel app

A Laravel developer discovered two critical issues when calling command-line tools such as Docker and kubectl from a web request instead of the terminal. First, web requests handled by PHP-FPM and nginx are terminated after roughly 30 seconds, making long-running CLI tasks unreliable and prone to silent failures; the solution is to dispatch these operations as queued jobs. Second, processes spawned from an HTTP context inherit a stripped-down environment, often lacking HOME and PATH variables that tools like Docker and kubectl rely on to locate their configuration files, causing them to behave as unauthenticated. The fix requires explicitly injecting the necessary environment variables when creating a child process using Symfony's Process component. Additionally, wrapping shell calls behind a contract interface allows developers to substitute a fake implementation during testing, avoiding the need to run real CLI tools in CI environments.