What is Guacamole?
So what is Guacamole? Of course we are not talking about that delicious food that you use for your salad or chips as dips. Apache Guacamole is a clientless remote desktop gateway. It supports standard protocols like VNC, RDP, and SSH. With Guacamole Server, you can access your server(s) via a web browser (ssh, VNC or RDP).
In other words, if you have a Windows Desktop and would like to access is via a web browser, you can do so with Guacamole.
In the following article, I will show you how to install Apache Guacamole server to a Linux server. There are 2 main parts in Guacamole. The first one is Guacamole Server and the second one is the client.
Install Guacamole-Server
Before we install the Guacamole-Server, we need to have a fully function Linux server. In this example, I am going to use CentOS 7. If needed, you can take a look at this article for how to install CentOS 7.
Once you have a working CentOS server, let’s make the server a development server so that we have all the tools needed to install or compile.
At the server prompt, enter yum groupinstall “Development tools”
yum groupinstall "Development tools"
Install dependencies
At the server prompt, enter the following
We also need to install ffmpeg and ffmpeg-devel. Since they are not part of the original repo, so we need to add new repo and install it that way.
Download Guacamole-Server and Guacamole-Client
Visit the following for Downloading Guacamole
https://guacamole.apache.org/releases/1.0.0/
You can download the files to your desktop and transfer them to the server via SCP. Or you can copy the link and then use elinks at the server to download them.
First, let’s get the URL from the browser on your desktop. You can do so by right click the URL and choose Copy Link Location (or something similar)
Then you can go back to your server and run the command elinks and paste the URL there.
First let’s create a Downloads directory at the server and run the command elinks there.
mkdir ~/Downloadscd ~/Downloadselinks
Paste the URL in the the elinks, click save and then ok to confirm download. (You can press CTRL-C to quite after download)
Repeat the above steps and download the client file as well. Since we are not going to compile the client file because it is written in Java and is cross-platform. So we will download the .war file instead.
Compile and install the server
Let’s do it.
cd ~/Downloadstar -xvf guacamole-server-1.0.0.tar.gzcd guacamole-server-1.0.0/./configure --with-init-dir=/etc/init.dmakemake installldconfig
Install the client
cd ~/Downloadscp guacamole-1.0.0.war /var/lib/tomcat/webapps/guacamole.warsystemctl enable tomcatsystemctl start tomcatsystemctl enable guacdsystemctl restart guacd
Please proceed to Part 2 for Guacamole Configuration
