heroku-vps

An repo for creating an VPS on Heroku

noVNC Display Container for Heroku (VPS)

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 2 composition.

Deploy to Heroku.

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

• socat - for use with other containers

• xterm - to demo that it works

• supervisord - to keep it all running

Usage

Variables

You can specify the following variables:

• DISPLAY_WIDTH=<width> (1024)

• DISPLAY_HEIGHT=<height> (768)

• RUN_XTERM={yes|no} (yes)

• RUN_FLUXBOX={yes|no} (yes)

Stand-alone Demo

Run:

$ docker run --rm -it -p 8080:8080 theasp/novnc

Open a browser and see the xterm demo at http://<server>:8080/vnc.html

V2 Composition

A version of the V2 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: '2'

services:

  ide:

    image: psharkey/intellij:latest

#    image: psharkey/netbeans-8.1:latest

    environment:

      - DISPLAY=novnc:0.0

    depends_on:

      - novnc

    networks:

      - x11

  novnc:

    image: theasp/novnc:latest

    environment:

      # Adjust to your screen size

      - DISPLAY_WIDTH=1600

      - DISPLAY_HEIGHT=968

      - RUN_XTERM=no

    ports:

      - "8080:8080"

    networks:

      - x11

networks:

  x11:

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

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.