How to Install Guacamole on Alpine Linux

Guacamole is a clientless remote desktop gateway that supports standard protocols like VNC, RDP, and SSH. In this tutorial, we will learn how to install Guacamole on Alpine Linux, which is a lightweight Linux distribution.

Prerequisites

A virtual machine, VPS, or dedicated server running Alpine Linux
A user account with sudo privileges or signed in as root

Step 1: Updating the System

Before installing any new software, we should update the existing packages on the system. We can do this by running the following command:

sudo apk update && sudo apk upgrade

Step 2: Installing Dependencies

Guacamole requires some dependencies to be installed, including Java, SSL, and Tomcat. We can install them using the following command:

sudo apk add openjdk8-jre-base openssl openssl-dev tomcat-native

Step 3: Downloading and Installing Guacamole

We can download the latest version of Guacamole package from https://guacamole.apache.org/releases/ by running the following command:

sudo wget -O guacamole.tar.gz https://apache.org/dyn/closer.lua?action=download&filename=guacamole/1.4.0/source/guacamole-server-1.4.0.tar.gz

Next, we can extract the compressed file using the following commands:

sudo tar zxvf guacamole.tar.gz
cd guacamole-server-1.4.0

We can now compile the source code and install the Guacamole server using the following commands:

sudo autoreconf -fi
sudo ./configure --with-init-dir=/etc/init.d
sudo make
sudo make install
sudo ldconfig

Step 4: Configuring Guacamole

Now that we have installed Guacamole, we need to configure it to work correctly. We can configure Guacamole by editing the guacamole.properties configuration file located at /usr/local/etc/guacamole/guacamole.properties using the following command:

sudo nano /usr/local/etc/guacamole/guacamole.properties

Edit the guacd-hostname and guacd-port settings to match the IP address and port of the Guacamole server.

guacd-hostname: localhost
guacd-port: 4822

Save and close the file by pressing CTRL+X, then Y, then ENTER.

Step 5: Starting the Guacamole Service

We can start the Guacamole service by running the following commands:

sudo rc-update add guacd default
sudo /etc/init.d/guacd start

We should see output indicating the service has started successfully.

Step 6: Accessing Guacamole Web Interface

By default, Guacamole listens on port 8080. We can confirm that the service is running by navigating to http://<server-ip>:8080/guacamole/ on a web browser.

We should be prompted to enter the default username and password, guacadmin and guacadmin, respectively. We should change the initial credentials to improve security.

Conclusion

Congratulations! We have successfully installed and configured Guacamole on Alpine Linux. We should now be able to use Guacamole to connect to remote desktops and servers using standard protocols like VNC, RDP, and SSH.