Can you run GUI applications in a Docker container?

Question

How can you run GUI applications in a Docker container?

Are there any images that set up vncserver or something so that you can - for example - add an e

Answer 1

The solution given at http://fabiorehm.com/blog/2014/09/11/running-gui-apps-with-docker/ does seem to be an easy way of starting GUI applications from inside the containers ( I tried for firefox over ubuntu 14.04) but I found that a small additional change is required to the solution posted by the author.

Specifically, for running the container, the author has mentioned:

    docker run -ti --rm \
    -e DISPLAY=$DISPLAY \
    -v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix \
    firefox

But I found that (based on a particular comment on the same site) that two additional options

    -v $HOME/.Xauthority:$HOME/.Xauthority

and

    -net=host 

need to be specified while running the container for firefox to work properly:

    docker run -ti --rm \
    -e DISPLAY=$DISPLAY \
    -v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix \
    -v $HOME/.Xauthority:$HOME/.Xauthority \
    -net=host \
    firefox

I have created a docker image with the information on that page and these additional findings: https://hub.docker.com/r/amanral/ubuntu-firefox/