Quickly Set Up Guacamole Using Docker

Apache Guacamole is a clientless remote desktop gateway. It supports standard protocols like VNC, RDP, and SSH.

Thanks to HTML5, once Guacamole is installed on a server, all you need to access your desktops is a web browser.

The Guacamole manual can be found here, but because the project is broken into 2 or more peices, it can take a bit of poking around and toggling between sections to find the exact steps one needs to quickly get up and running from scratch using Docker.

Projecting Rasters for Plotly Mapbox Plots

I like using Plotly to create interactive plots and maps straight from Python. I find it more intuitive than Bokeh’s API. When combined with Plotly’s sister library Dash, the pair can be very powerful in creating both interactive and dynamic web based tools and visualizations.

While Bokeh has some native Datashader integration, including in the mapping components, the Plotly Mapbox mapping backend relies on Mapbox’s own image overlay capability to display arbitrary Datashader outputs. Plotly has very helpful documentation and includes this use case as an example.

Useful Docker Patterns (On GNU/Linux)

To easily copy files from a Docker image when you dont want to start a container, you can do the following:

docker cp $(docker create --rm $IMAGE):$FROM_PATH $TO_PATH

Sometimes it is useful to compare the output of a command between two Docker images, especially comparing different versions of a particular image:

docker run --rm -ti --entrypoint=bash $IMAGE1 -c "$CMD" > /tmp/output1.tmp
docker run --rm -ti --entrypoint=bash $IMAGE2 -c "$CMD" > /tmp/output2.tmp
diff -s /tmp/output1.tmp /tmp/output2.tmp

I have both these command patterns saved as executable Bash shell scripts on my system path as cp_docker and diff_docker_cmd respectively.