Minimal docker image to run xpra with HTML 5 client and GPU accelerated OpenGL support

This docker image provides remote access using xpra to an xterm via a HTML5 based web client listening on port 14500 for websocket connections.

In addition to the docker-xpra-html5-minimal image, this image also provides GPU accelerated OpenGL support using VirtualGL. Currently this only works with NVIDIA GPUs and requires the NVIDIA drivers to be installed on the docker host.

Prerequisites for the docker host

For Ubuntu the NVIDIA drivers can be installed with:

LATEST_NVIDIA_DRIVER_VERSION=$(apt-cache search nvidia-headless | grep -E 'nvidia-headless-[0-9]+ ' | sed -r -e 's/nvidia-headless-([0-9]+).*/\1/' | tail -1)
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y nvidia-headless-$LATEST_NVIDIA_DRIVER_VERSION nvidia-utils-$LATEST_NVIDIA_DRIVER_VERSION libnvidia-gl-$LATEST_NVIDIA_DRIVER_VERSION

Additionally it is required to install the NVIDIA Container Toolkit which enables GPU sharing with docker containers (see NVIDIA Container Toolkit for details and instructions for other distributions).

# install NVIDIA Container Toolkit
distribution=$(. /etc/os-release;echo $ID$VERSION_ID)
curl -s -L https://nvidia.github.io/nvidia-docker/gpgkey | sudo apt-key add -
curl -s -L https://nvidia.github.io/nvidia-docker/$distribution/nvidia-docker.list | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/nvidia-docker.list
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y nvidia-container-toolkit
reboot

It is very important to reboot your system after installing the prerequisites before running a container with this image!

Example

By default, the container uses the default self-signed certificate to offer SSL. If you want to specify your own certificate, you can overwrite the default SSL certificate with the docker parameter similar to --mount type=bind,source="$(pwd)"/ssl-cert.pem,target=/etc/xpra/ssl-cert.pem,readonly (make sure to put the ssl-cert.pem file in the current folder or modify the source path).

By default, Xpra can only be accessed using a password. The default password is xpra, but can be changed by setting the environment variable XPRA_PW (e.g. using the docker run parameter -e XPRA_PW=mypassword).

It is useful to automatically restart the container on failures using the --restart unless-stopped parameter.

When running a container, the GPU needs to be passed to the container including the /dev/dri devices. The following is an example to run the glxspheres64 demo on the first GPU of the docker host:

docker run --gpus 1 --device=/dev/dri -p 14500:14500 ffeldhaus/docker-xpra-html5-opengl-minimal

Then open a browser with the hostname or IP of your docker host:

https://<hostname OR IP>:14500

Running the image will results in multiple warnings and error messages to be shown from xpra as xpra is trying to use a lot of recommended dependencies which are not included in this image.