π» Remote desktop in a container.
π¦ This image is also on Docker Hub as
dmotte/desktainer
and runs on several architectures (e.g. amd64, arm64, ...). To see the full list of supported platforms, please refer to the.github/workflows/main.yml
file. If you need an architecture which is currently unsupported, feel free to open an issue.
Thanks to fcwu/docker-ubuntu-vnc-desktop and soffchen/tiny-remote-desktop for the inspiration.
The simplest way to try this image is:
docker run -it --rm -p6901:6901 dmotte/desktainer
Note: since some GUI applications may have issues with Docker's default seccomp profile, you may need to use
--security-opt seccomp=unconfined
Then head over to http://localhost:6901/ to access the remote desktop.
The docker-compose.yml
file contains a complete usage example for this image. Feel free to simplify it and adapt it to your needs. Unless you want to build the image from scratch, comment out the build: build
line to use the pre-built one from Docker Hub instead.
To start the Docker-Compose stack in daemon (detached) mode:
docker-compose up -d
Then you can view the logs using this command:
docker-compose logs -ft
- π‘ If you want to change the resolution while the container is running, you can use the
xrandr --fb 1024x768
command. The new resolution cannot be larger than the one specified in theRESOLUTION
environment variable though - π‘ If you need to, you can extend this project by making your own
Dockerfile
starting from this image (i.e.FROM dmotte/desktainer
) and/or mount custom supervisor configuration files. See theexample
folder for an example of how to do it - π‘ This image is not meant to be run with the
--user
Docker option, because thestartup.sh
script needs to run as root in the initial phase. Moreover, the user created via theMAINUSER_NAME
environment variable (see below) will be a sudoer, so running the container as root is useful in any case. If you want a rootless version of this image, check out dmotte/desktainer-rootless
If you need to run commands at container startup, you can create Bash scripts in the following locations:
/opt/startup-early/*.sh
: these scripts will be included in alphabetical order before the main container initialization process/opt/startup-late/*.sh
: these scripts will be included in alphabetical order after the main container initialization process
See the startup.sh
script for more details.
Moreover, if you need to run commands after the LXDE startup, you can create launcher files in the /etc/xdg/autostart
or the ~/.config/autostart
directory.
List of supported environment variables:
Variable | Required | Description |
---|---|---|
RESOLUTION |
No (default: 1920x1080) | Screen resolution |
MAINUSER_NAME |
No (default: mainuser) | Name of the main user. If set to root , no user will be created and the main user will be root |
MAINUSER_PASS |
No (default: mainuser ) |
Password of the main user (if MAINUSER_NAME != root ) |
VNC_PASS |
No (default: none) | Password for the VNC server |
VNC_PORT |
No (default: 5901) | TCP port of the VNC server |
NOVNC_PORT |
No (default: 6901) | TCP port of the noVNC webserver |
If you want to contribute to this project, you can use the following one-liner to rebuild the image and bring up the Docker-Compose stack every time you make a change to the code:
docker-compose down && docker-compose up --build
Note: I know that this Docker image has many layers, but this shouldn't be a problem in most cases. If you want to reduce its number of layers, there are several techniques out there, e.g. see this