Docker container for ROS Meldoic with "headless" VNC session

This repository contains a Docker image for ROS Melodic (desktop-full version) that allows to run ROS as a Docker container and access GUIs (rviz, gazebo, ...) via VNC. This repo is forked from two other repos:

• https://github.com/ConSol/docker-headless-vnc-container and
• https://github.com/henry2423/docker-ros-vnc

More information may be found there.

Each Docker image is installed with the following components:

• Desktop environment Xfce4
• VNC-Server (default VNC port 5901)
• noVNC - HTML5 VNC client (default http port 6901)
• ROS Melodic full desktop version
• Visual Studio Code
• Browsers:
  • Mozilla Firefox
  • Chromium

Currently provided sessions:

• tdcode/docker-ros-vnc:latest: Ubuntu 18.04 with ROS Melodic, Tensorflow 2.0, and VNC support

• tdcode/docker-ros-vnc:nvidia: Ubuntu 18.04 with GPUs suppoer (via nvidia/cuda:10.1-cudnn7-devel-ubuntu18.04), ROS Melodic, Tensorflow 2.0, and VNC support

Usage

You will be running the container with following user:

user: ros
(sudo) password: ros

Running without GPU support

• Run command with mapping to local port 5901 (vnc protocol) and 6901 (vnc web access):

  docker run -d -p 5901:5901 -p 6901:6901 -e VNC_RESOLUTION=1920x1080 --rm tdcode/docker-ros-vnc:latest
  

  Note that -e VNC_RESOLUTION=1920x1080 may be adjusted to select an approriate screen resolution.

• If you want to get into the container use interactive mode -it and bash

  docker run -it --rm -p 5901:5901 -p 6901:6901 tdcode/docker-ros-vnc:latest bash
  

Running with GPU support

This should be basically the same, just replace docker by nvidia-docker (check out https://github.com/NVIDIA/nvidia-docker for latest information on how to enable run nvidia docker containers):

• With mapping to local port 5901 (vnc protocol) and 6901 (vnc web access):

  nvidia-docker run -d -p 5901:5901 -p 6901:6901 -e VNC_RESOLUTION=1920x1080 --rm tdcode/docker-ros-vnc:nvidia
  

• Using interactive mode -it and bash

  nvidiadocker run -it --rm -p 5901:5901 -p 6901:6901 tdcode/docker-ros-vnc:nvidia bash
  

Building an image from scratch

If you don't want to use the Dockerhub versions of these images, you may build the images yourself via

docker build -t docker-ros-nvidia-vnc -f Dockerfile.ubuntu.nvidia.xfce.vnc .

or

docker build -t docker-ros-vnc -f Dockerfile.ubuntu.xfce.vnc .

Connect & Control

If the container is started like mentioned above, connect via one of these options:

• connect via VNC viewer localhost:5901, default password: vncpassword
• connect via noVNC HTML5 full client: http://localhost:6901/vnc.html, default password: vncpassword
• connect via noVNC HTML5 lite client: http://localhost:6901/?password=vncpassword

Hints

1) Override VNC environment variables

The following VNC environment variables can be overwritten at the docker run phase to customize your desktop environment inside the container:

• VNC_COL_DEPTH, default: 24
• VNC_RESOLUTION, default: 1280x1024
• VNC_PW, default: my-pw

1.1) Example: Override the VNC password

Simply overwrite the value of the environment variable VNC_PW. For example in the docker run command:

docker run -it -p 5901:5901 -p 6901:6901 -e VNC_PW=my-pw consol/centos-xfce-vnc

1.2) Example: Override the VNC resolution

Simply overwrite the value of the environment variable VNC_RESOLUTION. For example in the docker run command:

docker run -it -p 5901:5901 -p 6901:6901 -e VNC_RESOLUTION=800x600 consol/centos-xfce-vnc

2) View only VNC

Since version 1.2.0 it's possible to prevent unwanted control via VNC. Therefore you can set the environment variable VNC_VIEW_ONLY=true. If set, the startup script will create a random password for the control connection and use the value of VNC_PW for view only connection over the VNC connection.

 docker run -it -p 5901:5901 -p 6901:6901 -e VNC_VIEW_ONLY=true tdcode/docker-ros-vnc:latest