Guacamole docker quick and easy

Apache Guacamole as an awesome HTML5 remote access gateway. Unfortunately it can be very frustrating to set up. They have docker images that are supposed to make the process easier, but I still ran into a lot of problems trying to get everything configured and linked.

Fortunately, a docker compose file exists to make Guacamole much easier to set up. Simply follow the instructions as laid out in the github readme:

  • Install docker & docker-compose
  • Clone their repository, run the initial prep script (for SSL keys & database initialization), and bring it up with docker-compose:
git clone "https://github.com/boschkundendienst/guacamole-docker-compose.git"
cd guacamole-docker-compose
sudo ./prepare.sh
sudo docker-compose up -d

Done! If you didn’t change anything in the docker-compose.yml file, you will have a new instance of Guacamole running on HTTPS port 8443 of your docker host. If you need to make changes (or if you forgot to run the prepare.sh file with sudo), you can run the reset.sh script which will destroy everything. You can then modify docker-compose.yml to suit your needs:

  • Whether to use nginx for HTTPS or just expose guacamole on port 8080 non-https (in case you already have a reverse proxy set up)
  • postgres password

Config files for each container are located within various folders in your guacamole-docker-compose folder. This can all be changed by editing the docker-compose.yml file.

Note this does configuration does not work with WOL, but as I do not use this feature I don’t mind.

Troubleshooting

docker ps will show running containers (docker ps -a shows all containers) If one is not running that should be, docker logs <container name> gives valuable insight as to why. In my case guacd was erroring out because I hadn’t initialized the database properly. Running the reset.sh script and starting over, this time running as sudo, did the trick.

Synchronize internet calendar to google calendar more frequently

Despite having my own e-mail server I still use Google Calendar for some things. I have an ICS file for the calendar for the Covid vaccination clinic I’m volunteering at. I ran into some frustrating sync problems when I tried to import it into my calendar. Google Calendar’s ICS sync process takes up to 12 hours, which was frustrating. I also had some mobile clients that wouldn’t even see the calendar imported from the ICS file.

I luckily found this post from Derek Antrican on stack exchange that outlines a script that you can configure to run at any given interval which will take all events in that ICS file and add/update/remove your calendar to match. It works beautifully. It’s a Google Apps script that you must copy into your own Google Scripts account to run.

First, go to the script here. Then go to Overview (i) and click “Make a Copy” in the top right (page icon.) Once the scripts are copied to your own script.google.com account, follow the instructions for configuring the script for your desired ICS URLs and other options, then click run.

My calendars are all synchronized and happy now.