firefox-in-docker (find)

Run Firefox in a docker container and forward over http using xpra, in order to have a graphical browser running on a remote machine.

Motivation: During trainings participants are often on a corporate network, and cannot access some IP addresses and ports. We can work around this by giving them a browser running a remote server, that they can connect to, and then connect to the blocked IPs and ports from the remote browser.

This is implemented by using XPra to run Firefox in a docker container, and forward the Firefox session over HTTP to a client browser.

This could also be used for running other applications we need to run on remote machines.

Usage

There are ready to use docker images available in the ghcr.io, use the release tag to get the latest stable version.

Using docker run

docker run -d -p 80:10000 --restart always ghcr.io/eficode-academy/find:release

Using docker-compose

git clone https://github.com/eficode-academy/firefox-in-docker
cd firefox-in-docker
docker-compose up -d

You can access the firefox instance from a browser on port 80 either using localhost from the same machine, ie:

http://localhost:80

If you are at a training and using a provided cloud machine, you should use the DNS name of your cloud machine:

http://inst<your-number>.<trainer-initials>.eficode.academy:80

Docker Images

There is a GitHub Actions pipeline set up to build and push a new version of the docker image on pushes to the main branch.