How to containerize an ERP system consisting of Desktop application (with GUI) and ASP.NET web app running on Windows Server 2012 R2. I’ve heard it’s impossible or very hard to containerize Desktop Applications with GUI.
What you’re looking for is a virtual machine not a container solution. A container solution is meant to run services in an isolated environment. Think of it like IIS except you’re not limited to web apps, but anything down to the OS level. However, they’re still backend services not a front end application client.
If your Windows application can run on Windows Server 2016 then you can containerize your application by starting with:
I think I understand what you’re looking to achieve; I’m a desktop admin and I’m wondering if you can containerize GUI enterprise applications like Bloomberg terminal. I’ve spent several hours toying with docker and tutorials; it’s apparent to me that I’ve mistook it for a fast way to deploy apps - the penny has dropped that this isn’t app-v or containers in the sense I’ve known them…
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Are you sure? I didn’t think chocolately did any kind of app-v, at least that doesn’t sound right to me. – Not in the sense that Windows developers are used to. – I thought chocolatey was a package manager (similar to like, apt-get? – e.g. it downloads, manages, installs, and updates application packages).
For windows developers and sysadmins, app-v means hosting (and running) your apps on a virtual server – but the GUI for them appears on the client machine’s desktop. – It uses the same technology as Remote Desktop (think VNC), except it only does it for a single Window (and it’s child windows). But those window(s) just shows up on the user’s computer as-if the program was being run there directly. – Even though the app is running on a different machine, the app-v pipeline makes local resources are available to the app directly (e.g. it can see your C: drive, and open and work with files there just like it was running there locally on your computer).
When I was googling for how to containerize a GUI app with docker, I was expecting to find something built-in that would let me host an electron based front-end that I could just point at a specific port on the container (i.e. “–itgui 8080” instead of “-it”, and suddenly a window pops up).
Then my GUI app could run inside the container, and work anywhere that docker did. – Docker really just needs some “glue” to be added to make it all automatic. (As-is, I’m sure anyone could develop a toolchain for making this happen, but, unless it was built-in to docker, it would defeat the purpose of containerizing your app, because your app would have dependencies that were external to the container.)
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@brainslugs83 did you ever find a solution to this?
I’m running Apache Guacamole in docker behind traefik and cloudflare, but it would be nice to expose only the application via web browser as oppose to launching an entire desktop.