Running XBeaver with Docker

XBeaver can be downloaded and compiled with make on linux. However, with my linux of choice being Arch Linux and my laptop being a Macbook Pro I found myself struggling to compile it. Arch was just too new, and my Mac wasn’t Linux.

I tried using a distribution such as CentOS within Virtualbox on my Mac which worked but was slow and regularly stopped working. In the end I came up with a much better solution by running XBeaver in a Docker Container on my Mac. Docker works with Windows and Linux so the following should also work for those platforms with perhaps only minor changes.

Docker can be downloaded from https://docker.com and once installed the following command issued from the Mac commands prompt will download and run the xbeaver container.

   $ docker pull johnnewcombe/xbeaver

The following command will run the docker image and bind the local ‘/Users/john/Gemini80′ folder to the Docker images “/root/Gemini80’ folder. It will also allow the image to be accessed via VNC or HTML

   $ docker run -d -p 5901:5901 -p 6901:6901 johnnewcombe/xbeaver

Connect using a VNC client on the Mac using the address localhost :5901 or via a browser on http://localhost:6901. The password is vncpassword.

The xbeaver compiled binary and source code is located in /headless and can be run from there, although I find it convenient to copy the compiled binary xbeaver, *.cfg and *.dsk files to the /root/xbeaver folder and bind this folder to a folder on my Mac. This allows config files and disks etc. to be managed directly with the Mac. e.g.

$ docker run -d -p 5901:5901 -p 6901:6901 -v /Users/john/.xbeaver:/root/xbeaver --name xbeaver johnnewcombe/xbeaver

More details of the image can be found on Docker Hub see https://hub.docker.com/repository/docker/johnnewcombe/xbeaver.

Please note that my image is built upon the consol/centos-icewm-vnc container and my thanks go to the developers of this.