If you frequently connect to multiple Remote Desktop or SSH clients, Apache Guacamole might just be the tool for you. This HTML5 based client-less remote desktop gateway is designed to setup a dashboard to speed up those connections, and switch between them quickly. Installing this container is super simple if you just want to get it up and running in a home environment, but please note that this is not ideal for production usage as the PostgreSQL server, the guacd daemon, and guacamole apache webserver are all bundled in one container. With the warning out of the way, lets get to tinkering!
This container install is very similar to setting up Portainer, and we will just use a modified command for it. Let’s build the container and download Guacamole! If you haven’t already done so, please follow my Docker guide to get the environment set up and ready to go.
docker volume create guacamole
That should get the container built and ready
docker run -p 8080:8080 --name Guacamole --restart always -v /config:/config unsafetypin/guacamole
It will take a few minutes to process, as it’s building an creating the PostgreSQL server, installing a web daemon, and setting up a webserver. now run ip address to get your Docker install IP if you hadn’t already written it down, and visit the new site.
ip address
http://'HOST-IP':8080/
The default username/pass are both guacadmin
After logging on my first step is to click on guacadmin in the upper right, select settings, users tab, and create a new user named whichever you prefer, grant it admin access, then logout/login and delete the factory account.
Once logged back in, go back to settings and select the connections tab. Lets get that Docker install configured!
Once you configure the connection, go to the Guacamole home, and you’ll see the connection listed at the bottom, click it and you should have a shiny new SSH connection ready to go. One of the benefits of using this over the ESXi console is the ability to use copy-paste. It’s not the best integration I’ve seen but it at least works, just hit CRTL+ALT+SHIFT to open the side menu and paste your values in the box. Once it’s in there you can right-click in the console pane to paste it.