frikilax/novnc-base repository overview

⁠docker-novnc

This Docker's goal is to provide a base image for people willing to build a graphical application on servers, headless machines or local hosts. This docker image uses phusion/base-image⁠ as base, and adds the necessary components to have an application up and running in a graphical environment accessed through a web page.

This image comes with no application bundled to launch at startup, but installing and running one is made easy with the steps already done here: simply use it as base, then install your application and write a simple service script⁠ for it during image build, and you're done !

⁠The technologies used here

• TigerVNC (v1.9.0)⁠ for the VNC server and X server handling
• noVNC (v1.1.0)⁠ for the VNC client over a web page
• ratpoison (v1.4.8)⁠ as a lightweight windows manager

⁠Things you should know

• port 6080 should be opened to access noVNC interface
• dynamic rescaling is supported (just make sure your noVNC client has "remote resizing" scaling mode)
• This SHOULD NOT be used in production environments or publicly available servers, as it IS NOT SECURE
• This could be used to run several applications in a split view, using ratpoison to display them side-by-side (although it goes against docker's philosophy)

⁠Next steps

• integrate pathword authentication
• use SSL/TLS connection
• shrink the image size

⁠Additional informations

This is an image I play with to bundle and run applications on headless servers, this is not an extensive project. you can find the current image on docker hub⁠ if you want the image. Feel free to contact me if you think I could use other technologies, make improvements, correct mistakes or if you simply think this image was helpful ! :)