4nte / xserver

Your Universal GUI Display for Docker

xserver

Your Universal GUI Display for Docker

What is xserver?

xserver is a docker image to display your GUI application in Docker. xserver contains:

• An X virtual framebuffer server (Xvfb) to receive GUI data from other containers.
• A VNC server to let you see the GUI in a VNC viewer on your host computer.

You could also choose to disable the VNC server and only open the Xvfb (for example, you want to do GUI auto tests without real display). The following figure is how xserver works:

Installation

• Step 1. Install docker by following Docker official installation guide. Docker is cross-platform so you can run xserver on Mac OSX / Linux / Windows.

• Step 2. Download the image, run

$ docker pull weichuntsai/xserver:1.0

• Step 3. Install a VNC viewer. I recommend RealVNC.

• Step 4. Initialize the xserver container, the command is as follows:

$ docker run --name ${container_name} \
  -e VNC_PASSWORD=${password} \
  -e SCREEN_SIZE=${screen_size} \
  -e SCREEN_DPI=${screen_dpi} \
  -e DISABLE_VNC=${disable_vnc} \
  -e DISABLE_WM=${disable_wm} \
  -p ${host_port}:5900 \
  weichuntsai/xserver:1.0

where container_name, password and host_port are must items; screen_size, screen_dpi, disable_vnc, and disable_wm are optional.

For example, to enable the Xvfb and the VNC server, just run

$ docker run --name mydisplay -e VNC_PASSWORD=1234 -p 5901:5900 weichuntsai/xserver:1.0

For other scenarios of this step, please refer to the section Other examples to initialize xserver.

• Step 5. Initialize your GUI application container with link to xserver container (assume your GUI application image is myapp-img, and you want to name the app container as myapp-ctn), please run

$ docker run --name myapp-ctn --link mydisplay:xserver --volumes-from mydisplay -dt myapp-img 

• Step 6. Setup authentication cookie in your GUI application container. Just copy setup-xclient.sh of this repo into your container root and run it as follows:

$ docker cp setup-xclient.sh myapp-ctn:/
$ docker exec -it myapp-ctn bash
$ chmod 755 /setup-xclient.sh; /setup-xclient.sh xserver; source ${HOME}/.bashrc

Then please run the command of your GUI application in myapp-ctn.

• Step 7. Open your VNC viewer in the host computer (assume you initialize xserver like Step 4), connect to localhost:5901 and type in the password 1234, then you can see your GUI appication window inside the VNC viewer window like the following figure:

Other examples to initialize xserver

• I want to set screen_size and screen_dpi for Xvfb:

$ docker run --name mydisplay -e VNC_PASSWORD=1234 -e SCREEN_SIZE=1200x675x24 -e SCREEN_DPI=75 -p 5901:5900 weichuntsai/xserver:1.0

• I want to enable VNC server but disable the window manager:

$ docker run --name mydisplay -e VNC_PASSWORD=1234 -e DISABLE_WM=true -p 5901:5900 weichuntsai/xserver:1.0

If you disable the window manager, you can not resize your GUI application window size.

• I want to disable the VNC server:

$ docker run --name mydisplay -e DISABLE_VNC=true weichuntsai/xserver:1.0