Nicotine+ noVNC Docker Container

This build is based on realies/soulseek-docker, adapted to run nicotine-plus.

The source documentation has more details and most of those are also applicable here.

Setup

1. You will need to map port 6080 on the machine (or any other port) to port 6080 on the docker container running this image.
   • If you are using a GUI or webapp (e.g. Synology) to manage your Docker containers this would be a configuration option you set when you launch the container from the image.
   • With the Docker CLI the option is -p 6080:6080.
2. Optionally you can also map a port on the machine to port 5900 on the docker container to get direct VNC access
3. You will need to map a port for Nicotine listening port on the Docker container. These ports can be configured from within Nicotine but whatever those ports are, they need to be mapped a) from your router to the machine hosting this docker image and b) from the outside of the docker image to the server within it. See below for more details.
4. You will probably also want to set up a place on the local disk for Nicotine to work with/download to/etc. While you can of course just point the app at existing folders it is probably wiser to give the app its own siloed off location on disk.

Once that is done you should be able to connect to the machine on port 6080 with a standard web browser through the magic of noVNC. Example: if your docker VM machine has IP 192.168.1.23 you should be able to connect to the Nicotine app running in docker by typing https://192.168.1.23:6080 (or http://192.168.1.23:6080 depending on your machine's security settings) in your browser after launching the container.

Usage

Configuration Parameters

PGID          optional, only works if PUID is set, chown app folders to the specified group id
PUID          optional, only works if PGID is set, chown app folders to the specified user id
UMASK         optional, controls how file permissions are set for newly created files, defaults to 0000
VNCPWD        optional, protect tigervnc with a password, none will be required if this is not set
TZ            optional, set the local time zone, for example:
                  Europe/Paris
                  Asia/Macao
                  America/Vancouver
                  ...other values available in /usr/share/zoneinfo

How To Launch

Using Docker Compose

docker-compose up -d

Using Docker Compose YML File

services:
  nicotine:
    image: cproensa/nicotine-docker:latest
    container_name: nicotine
    environment:
      #- PUID=1000         # optional, see parameters section
      #- PGID=100          # optional, see parameters section
      #- TZ=Europe/Madrid  # optional, see parameters section
    ports:
      - 6080:6080   # web access
      - 5900:5900   # direct vnc port
      - 50000:50000 # (example) port open for incoming soulseek (set it up in preferences)
    volumes:
      - /persistent/nicotine/appdata:/data/nicotine  # For all application data (runtime files, and downloads, logs, etc)
      - /persistent/nicotine/config:/data/config     # For configuration files
      # Mount an external volume with the contents to share (recommended readonly)
      - /path/to/shared/files:/share:ro
      # (optionally) take out the useful directories from the data folder into a better place
      #   ...these are the default directories, maped 1 by 1:
      # - /your/home/nicotine/complete:/data/nicotine/downloads
      # - /your/home/nicotine/incomplete:/data/nicotine/incomplete
      # - /your/home/nicotine/uploads:/data/nicotine/received
      # - /your/home/nicotine/logs:/data/nicotine/logs
      # or just mount a single external volume and change those directories in preferences to be inside that mount point:
      # - /your/home/nicotine:/folders
    restart: unless-stopped    

How To Build

The Dockerfile script will copy an external .deb package during the build process, named debian-package.zip, which is the release package as described in the

Straightforward build:

```
docker-compose build
```

Using build.sh script

Usage: ./build.sh <target> [push-user]

target can be either:

• latest to download the latest stable .deb release version
• testing to donwload the latest nightly build .deb package
• a specific version number to download any version release .deb package (e.g. 3.2.9)

[optional] push user is the user name to push image to the hub.

• Example: build locally with development release: ./build testing
  • This will create a tagged image: nicotine-docker:testing
• Example: build with a version and push to hub: ./build 3.2.9 user_name
  • This will create a tagged image: user_name/nicotine-docker:3.2.9 and push.

Additional tips

Reverse proxy with subpath

It's tricky to configure this noVnc setup behind a reverse proxy under a subpath. Here's an example for nginx reverse proxy.

The aim is: assuming the direct service is accesible as http://<host>:<port>, to have a different host proxying this service as http://<proxy_host>/nic. This is usually done when this proxy host is desired to work as an entry point for several services, each one beneath a different subpath (in this example only the rules for the nicotine redirection is included).

Key points:

1. location /nic/ for the general redirection.

This will however still cause noVnc to look for the websocket at the root location of our proxy host (/<proxy_host>/websockify). To avoid this and keep all resources under the /nic/subpath, next step is needed:

2. location /nic/websockify pointing to the websocket, adding specific directives optimized for websocket

And, now it should be accesible with: http://<proxy_host>/nic/vnc.html?path=nic/websockify. Notice the parameter to set explicitly the path to the websocket.

To make it easier, a third rule is added:

3. location /nic for an automatic redirect to that url:

Now our service is accesible simply with http://<proxy_host>/nic

Note: absolute_redirect off to allow relative url in the redirect, and keep host and port of the original request. Good for example, when this server is a container mapped to an external port different than 80

Example configuration file:

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name _;

    absolute_redirect off;

    # proxy.conf include for common proxy directives
    # for example:  https://github.com/linuxserver/docker-swag/commits/master/root/defaults/nginx/proxy.conf.sample
 
    location /nic {
        return 302 /nic/vnc.html?path=nic/websockify&autoconnect=true&resize=remote;       
    }

    location /nic/ {
        include /config/nginx/proxy.conf;
        proxy_pass http://<host>:<port>/;
    }

    location /nic/websockify {
        include /config/nginx/proxy.conf;
        proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
        proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";
        proxy_pass http://<host>:<port>;
    }
}