GUI based Application inside DOCKER Container !!

Sheetal Agarwal

5 min readJun 1, 2021

✅Task Description 👩🏻‍💻 -

📌 GUI container on the Docker

🔅 Launch a container on docker in GUI mode

🔅 Run any GUI software on the container

What is Docker ?

Docker is a container Technology, it is simple to construct containers and container-based apps thanks to Docker, a container technology. Docker is so quick that we can launch containers (OS) with its assistance in a matter of seconds. If you want to create a single application that can run and function consistently in any environment, Docker is the perfect tool.

We’ll talk about how to execute GUI programmes within a Docker container in this article. We might need GUI applications within a Docker container if we wish to put an application on top of one that needs a user interface.

We must share the DISPLAY environment variable with the Container in order to run GUI programmes within a Docker container. The display is not attached to a new launch container. We must connect the display of baseOS.

We are going to launch Jupyter Notebook and Firefox inside Docker container.

Let’s start implementation -

First of all we need to configure Docker inside our machine. I’m using RedHat virtual machine. Let’s check that docker is configured in this system or not.

rpm -q docker

We can see that docker is not configured in this virtual machine.

First of all create a docker repository.

cd /etc/yum.repos.d
vim docker.repo

Now check the repository of docker.

yum repolist

Here, we can see that docker repository is successfully created.

Now install the docker using following command.

yum install docker-ce --nobest

Here, docker is installed successfully.

Now check the version of docker.

docker --version

Now start the service of docker.

systemctl start docker

Now check the existing images and launched containers by following command.

docker images 
docker ps -a

Here, we can see that there is no docker image and docker container.

Now pull the docker image. I am pulling centos image.

docker pull centos:latest

Docker images is pulled.

Now create a workspace for our task.

Create a Dockerfile.

mkdir /Docker
cd /Docker
vim Dockerfile

Dockerfile for Jupyter Notebook.

Now create docker image.

docker build -t docker_jupyter .

Docker image for Jupyter Notebook is created.

Docker Image for Jupyter Notebook.
https://hub.docker.com/repository/docker/sheetal26/docker_jupyter

Now launch a Docker container for jupyter notebook.

— name= Assign a name to the container
— env=”DISPLAY” ( Sharing the DISPLAY environment variable to the container)
— net=host (run the OS with Host’s Network driver)