noVNC Display Container

This image is intended to be used for displaying X11 applications from other containers in a browser. A stand-alone demo as well as a Version 3 composition.

The original image for use by the Wisconsin Autonomous student organization.

Image Contents

• Xvfb - X11 in a virtual framebuffer
• x11vnc - A VNC server that scrapes the above X11 server
• noNVC - A HTML5 canvas vnc viewer
• Fluxbox - a small window manager
• xterm - to demo that it works
• supervisord - to keep it all running

Usage

Password

The password for the vnc container is wa!!!! VNC cannot be run password-less.

Stand-alone Demo

Run:

$ docker run --rm -it -p 8080:8080 -p 5900:5900 wiscauto/vnc

Open a browser and see the desktop at http://<server>:8080/. If you're running this locally, <server> will most likely be localhost. Further, you can also access the VNC instance using a vnc viewer at http://<server>:5900.

V3 Composition

A version of the V3 docker-compose example is shown below to illustrate how this image can be used to greatly simplify the use of X11 applications in other containers. With just docker-compose up -d, your favorite IDE can be accessed via a browser.

Some notable features:

• An x11 network is defined to link the IDE and novnc containers
• The IDE DISPLAY environment variable is set using the novnc container name
• The screen size is adjustable to suit your preferences via environment variables
• The only exposed port is for HTTP browser connections

version: '3'
services:
  ide:
    image: psharkey/intellij:latest
    environment:
      - DISPLAY=novnc:0.0
    depends_on:
      - novnc
    networks:
      - x11
  novnc:
    image: wiscauto/vnc:latest
    ports:
      - "8080:8080"
			- "5900:5900"
    networks:
      - x11
networks:
  x11:

If the IDE fails to start simply run docker-compose restart <container-name>.

On DockerHub / GitHub

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• DockerHub wiscauto/vnc
• GitHub wiscauto/docker-vnc

Thanks

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This is based on the alpine container by @psharkey: https://github.com/psharkey/docker/tree/master/novnc Based on wine-x11-novnc-docker and octave-x11-novnc-docker.