Stand-alone Leo / guacamole docker container

Read Security for security issues.

Leo is a Python / PyQt5 editor / IDE / info. manager: http://leoeditor.com/

Guacamole is a server that serves a web app. that lets you connect to remote desktops (e.g. via VNC): https://guacamole.apache.org/

This repo. contains a Dockerfile and some scripts to run Leo in a VNC session in the same Docker container that's running guacamole, effectively turning Leo into a web. app. This repo. builds on https://github.com/oznu/docker-guacamole because it's a single self contained Docker container, unlike the three container ecosystem described by the official guacamole Docker instructions.

I guess this would work in Docker for Windows running Linux containers, which installs a Linux VM in Windows, but I wouldn't try that, this is only tested with Linux, Ubuntu 18.04, specifically, as the host. The Docker container's based on Alpine Linux.

So assuming you have Docker installed and working, clone this repo., cd into it, and:

docker build -t leo-editor .

which should download a bunch of stuff and create the Docker image on your local system. Depending on machine speed / internet speed it make take some time.

Then create a new folder somewhere else (not in the repo. folder) and run:

docker run -it --rm -p 8080:8080 -v $PWD/conf:/conf leo-editor

to run the container. It takes a while to start up, at least 25 seconds. If you're already running something on port 8080, change the first 8080 in the above to an available port and use that in the address of the server: http://127.0.0.1:8080/, which you should visit in a web-browser.

Log in with username/password guacadmin/guacadmin, and if it doesn't immediately open Leo in the web-browser, try opening the connection called test.

When you exit Leo, the whole container exits.

Caveats

• Ctrl-W closes the browser tab, not the Leo tab.
• These docs. don't cover keeping your work (a Docker admin. detail) or deploying the container on the internet.
• A folder conf is created by guacamole in the folder from which you docker run this, it may belong to root. That's normal docker behavior.
• If you use PyQt5, this almost works, but not quite. There are three VNC servers in the Alpine Linux distribution. Under vnc4server and tigervncserver PyQt5 seg. faults when you try and run Leo. The Dockerfile in this repo. installs tightvncserver, which runs Leo, but the keyboard mapping is hopelessly messed up. As in you can't type even plain text - a VNC/X11 issue, not Leo related. That's why this uses PyQt4.

Security

guacadmin/guacadmin is the globally known default login to guacamole, and may allow others to see stuff on you're machine if (a) you expose it to the internet, and (b) you have a VNC service running on your machine. It's a small manageable risk, but if you don't know about these things and don't feel comfortable with it, don't do it.