rcribbs/arch-vnc-headless

Arch is a lightweight and flexible Linux® distribution that tries to Keep It Simple.
Xfce is a lightweight desktop environment for UNIX-like operating systems.
TigerVNC is a high-performance, platform-neutral implementation of VNC (Virtual Network Computing), a client/server application that allows users to launch and interact with graphical applications on remote machines.

Description

This repo creates a docker image of Arch with Xfce, VNC and some essentials installed to act as an always-on remote workspace.

Version Tags

This image provides various versions that are available via tags. latest tag usually provides the latest stable version. Others are considered under development and caution must be exercised when using them.

Tag	Description
latest	Stable releases

Usage

Here are some example snippets to help you get started creating a container.

docker-compose (recommended)

Compatible with docker-compose v2 schemas.

---
version: "2.1"
services:
  arch-vnc:
    image: rcribbs/arch-vnc-headless
    container_name: arch-vnc
    environment:
      - VNC_PASSWORD="s3cr3t"
      - CUSTOM_RESOLUTIONS="2048x1536,544x662"
    ports:
      - 5901:5901
    restart: unless-stopped

docker cli

docker run -d \
  --name arch-vnc \
  -e VNC_PASSWORD="s3cr3t" \
  -e CUSTOM_RESOLUTIONS="2048x1536,544x662" \
  -p 5901:5901 
  --restart unless-stopped \
  rcribbs/arch-vnc-headless

Parameters

Container images are configured using parameters passed at runtime (such as those above). These parameters are separated by a colon and indicate <external>:<internal> respectively. For example, -p 8080:80 would expose port 80 from inside the container to be accessible from the host's IP on port 8080 outside the container.

Parameter	Function
-p 5901	VNC port
-e VNC_PASSWORD	Password used to access VNC
-e CUSTOM_RESOLUTIONS="2048x1536,544x662"	A comma separated list of custom resolutions to add to xrandr

Operation

Once you run the image you can connect to it using the specified VNC port (Default is 5901) using your client of choice (TigerVNC recommended). The default user will be the docker user with a default password of changeme and membership in the wheel group with sudo access.

You may choose to keep this container around as your own image with docker save or just stopping/starting when needed. Be careful that by default (as with docker in general) nothing will be persisted if you delete the container without saving it to an image.

Though I haven't tested it, is image should be extendable as well if you wanted to build one with more dependencies pre-installed.