Running Desktop apps in ShinyProxy

Screenshots

This repository contains two demos of running desktop apps using ShinyProxy. The first demo demonstrates running Phaedra while the second demo show how to run Visual Studio Code.

Note: we have dedicated demo for running VS code as a native webapp inside ShinyProxy.

We make extensively use of the great docker-ubuntu-vnc-desktop project.

Building the Docker images

In order to build the Docker images, simply execute the build.sh script. This script first builds two base images (one for Ubuntu 16.04 and one for 20.04). Next, it builds shinyproxy-desktop-app-demo:phaedra and shinyproxy-desktop-app-demo:vscode containing the respective applications. You can also simply download the images from Docker Hub.

ShinyProxy configuration

The following configuration is all what is needed to run these applications inside ShinyProxy:

proxy:
  specs:
    - id: phaedra
      container-image: openanalytics/shinyproxy-desktop-app-demo:phaedra
      port: 80
      websocket-reconnection-mode: None
      container-env:
        # Use the following line when using ShinyProxy 2.6.0 or later
        RELATIVE_URL_ROOT: "#{proxy.getRuntimeValue('SHINYPROXY_PUBLIC_PATH')}"
        # Use the following line when using ShinyProxy 2.5.0
        # RELATIVE_URL_ROOT: "#{proxySpec.containerSpecs[0].env.get('SHINYPROXY_PUBLIC_PATH')}"
    - id: vscode
      container-image: openanalytics/shinyproxy-desktop-app-demo:vscode
      port: 80
      websocket-reconnection-mode: None
      container-env:
        # Use the following line when using ShinyProxy 2.6.0 or later
        RELATIVE_URL_ROOT: "#{proxy.getRuntimeValue('SHINYPROXY_PUBLIC_PATH')}"
        # Use the following line when using ShinyProxy 2.5.0
        # RELATIVE_URL_ROOT: "#{proxySpec.containerSpecs[0].env.get('SHINYPROXY_PUBLIC_PATH')}"

How does this work?

The docker-ubuntu-vnc-desktop project is a Docker container which contains the following components:

• LXDE
• xvfb
• x11vnc
• noVNC
• nginx
• superverisor
• a web app to manage everything

The idea is to have an X server (xvfb), running a desktop environment (LXDE), this is exposed by VNC server (x11vnc) using a web app (nginx/python/vue/noVNC). All these processes are managed by supervisor such that it fits in a single Docker container.

Screenshots

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