Member-only story
Running Desktop Apps in Docker
Learn how to run desktop apps, such as GIMP, Eclipse IDE, Firefox, etc. in Docker
Docker is the de facto standard when running containerised applications these days. From simple Hello Worlds to complex, multi-container setups, your application’s deployment could never be simpler.
But what about those applications requiring a graphical front end? Docker is a server-side technology — certainly, you can’t have graphics, right? Or can you? Let’s find out next (TL;DR: yes, you can).
Docker Doesn’t Have Graphics
The term graphics can signify a variety of things in the computer-science and software-development worlds, and certainly, I am not going to try defining it here. With some poetic license, let’s loosely call a desktop application a graphical application: a software requiring a canvas to draw on its user interface.
Obviously, you don’t expect Docker to provide such a canvas to your containers and, rightly so, it does not. In fact, many times you are asked to run a Docker container in headless mode, exactly because of that. So how does one run a desktop application in Docker? Let’s figure that out.
