swayvnc - VNC Desktop in a Container

The base image for remote application servers like swayvnc-firefox
swayvnc uses Sway with wayvnc to create a headless wayland desktop with arbitrary payloads, e.g. a web page with swayvnc-firefox

Due to missing applications (payloads) the container is of little use as it is. It is the base image for application containers like swayvnc-firefox. Try this one to get a better experience of how this works.

Build container

$ podman build -t swayvnc .

Build dependencies

The container uses swayvnc-build to build the needed wayvnc apk for alpine, since the packages are not available for all archs we want to support. They get copied from the swayvnc-build image with "COPY --from=" during the build of swayvnc

Run Container

$ export LISTEN_ADDRESS="127.0.0.1"; \
         podman run -e XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/tmp \
                    -e WLR_BACKENDS=headless \
                    -e WLR_LIBINPUT_NO_DEVICES=1 \
                    -e SWAYSOCK=/tmp/sway-ipc.sock
                    -p${LISTEN_ADDRESS}:5910:5910 \
                    -p${LISTEN_ADDRESS}:7023:7023 swayvnc
# or
$ ./run.sh

Connect

Use some vnc client to connect to the server

$ wlvncc <vnc-server> 5910
# or
$ vinagre [vnc-server:5910]

Run Commands

Run commands with swaymsg by using socat to put them on the network Replace $IP with the actual IP you want to listen on

$ socat UNIX-LISTEN:/tmp/swayipc,fork TCP:$IP:7023
$ SWAYSOCK=/tmp/swayipc swaymsg command exec "firefox [URL]"