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/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.

Simple usage

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.

Standard usage

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

Tips

💡 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 the RESOLUTION environment variable though
💡 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 example folder for an example of how to do it
💡 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 user created via the MAINUSER_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

Running commands at container startup

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.

Environment variables

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`)
`MAINUSER_NOPASSWORD`	No (default: `false`)	Whether or not the main user should be allowed to `sudo` without password
`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

Development

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