vlu7109 / desktainer

🖥 Remote desktop in a container

desktainer

💻 Remote desktop in a container.

📦 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/docker.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.

✳️ For an extended version of this Docker image, see dmotte/desktainer-plus.

Usage

The simplest way to try this image is:

docker run -it --rm -p 6901:6901 dmotte/desktainer

Then head over to http://localhost:6901/ to access the remote desktop.

For a more complex example, refer to the docker-compose.yml file.

Note: this image is not meant to be run with the --user Docker option, because the startup.sh script needs to run as root in the initial phase. Moreover, the custom user created via the USER environment variable (see below) will be a sudoer, so running the container as root is useful in any case.

💡 Tip: 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 the dmotte/desktainer-plus Docker image for an example of how to do it.

Environment variables

List of supported environment variables:

Variable	Required	Description
RESOLUTION	No (default: 1280x720)	Screen resolution
USER	No (default: debian)	Name of the custom user. If set to root, no custom user will be created and the main user will be root
PASSWORD	No (default: debian)	Password of the custom user (if USER != root)
VNC_PASSWORD	No (default: debian)	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

Development

If you want to contribute to this project, the first thing you have to do is to clone this repository on your local machine:

git clone https://github.com/dmotte/desktainer.git

Then you just have to run this command:

docker-compose down && docker-compose up --build

This will automatically build the Docker image using the docker-build directory as build context and then the Docker-Compose stack will be started.

If you prefer to run the stack in daemon (detached) mode:

docker-compose up -d

In this case, you can view the logs using the docker-compose logs command:

docker-compose logs -ft