Guacamole is a clientless remote desktop gateway for VNC, RDP, and SSH protocols. Using this you can connect to any of your computers via a web browser. It can be installed as a standalone application or as a docker image. Docker installation is the easiest to install and maintain.
Here we shall see how to install Guacamole as a docker container and connect to a remote machine quickly.
Installing Guacamole Docker container
Make sure you have installed Portainer & Docker before proceeding. We will add a docker stack of Guacamole and MariaDB using Portainer.
1. On Portainer, add a new stack with name Guacamole. Leave the Build method as Web Editor.
2. Copy the below compose file content into the Web editor. You can customize if needed and deploy.
version: "2"
services:
db:
image: mariadb
restart: unless-stopped
container_name: mariadb
environment:
- MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=rootpw
- MYSQL_DATABASE=guacamole_db
- MYSQL_USER=guacamole_user
- MYSQL_PASSWORD=guacamolepw
volumes:
- /opt/container/mariadb:/var/lib/mysql
ports:
- 3306:3306
hostname: mariadb
networks:
- intranet
guacd:
image: guacamole/guacd
container_name: guacd
hostname: guacd
restart: always
volumes:
- /opt/container/guacamole/guacd:/etc/guacamole
ports:
- 4822:4822
networks:
- intranet
guacamole:
image: guacamole/guacamole
container_name: guacamole
hostname: guacamole
restart: always
volumes:
- /opt/container/guacamole/guacamole:/etc/guacamole
ports:
- 3080:8080
environment:
- GUACD_HOSTNAME=guacd
- GUACD_PORT=4822
- MYSQL_HOSTNAME=mariadb
- MYSQL_PORT=3306
- MYSQL_DATABASE=guacamole_db
- MYSQL_USER=guacamole_user
- MYSQL_PASSWORD=guacamolepw
- GUACAMOLE_HOME=/data
networks:
- intranet
networks:
intranet:
external:
name: intranet 3. Guacamole needs the tables configured in the MariaDB docker container to work. The below to commands accomplish that. After running the above commands, make sure to restart all three containers.
docker run --rm guacamole/guacamole /opt/guacamole/bin/initdb.sh --mysql > initdb.sql
docker exec -i mariadb mysql -u root --password=rootpw guacamole_db < initdb.sql 4. Then, go to http://localhost:8080/guacamole/ and login with default credentials guacadmin:guacadmin. Now you have successfully installed Guacamole on docker.
