Client-free remote desktop access for all

Guacamole is a open-source software project consisting of a client and server component that work together to enable remote connectivity to server environments from a web browser. In fact, this open-source project goes back as far as 2010, having spent several years being maintained on SourceForge, with varying periods of development and interest from the Linux community. The project reached a milestone 1.0 release at the beginning of 2019.

In its current state, Guacamole is a nicely matured open source project with high-quality code and runtime components that have a straightforward configuration model, yet it also offers a more advanced configuration and enterprise integration to bolster security and user management, for example.

Guacamole offers ready to run installation packages for distros such as CentOS or Debian. However, the thrust of this article will be to illustrate fetching the source code from GitHub and moving through the series of steps required for local compilation, configuration and deployment of the server-side components – it’s not too difficult.

Beyond introducing you to this very nice open source project, we also want to help you to follow this project at the source code level and encourage you to continue to follow this project.

Tasty features of Guacamole

The Guacamole remote desktop solution has several interesting features, including:

Clientless footprint, as no client-side binary installs or special packages are required.

The backend consists of two major components: the proxy and the web app. The latter is