Writing your own Workspaces

Stardust workspaces are, at the core, a Docker container. They have a desktop environment installed, coupled with a VNC server and the Stardust Container Agent.

Agent

Stardust's container agent is an HTTP server running on any Stardust container on port 6080. It's source code can be found on GitHub. The agent is currently used for file transfer, grabbing a screenshot for image previews, and for getting the container's VNC token. The agent should be able to write to the stardust user's home directory, and the temp directory. The stock agent is written in TypeScript and uses Fastify. More details can be found here.

VNC

Stardust expects a VNC server running on port 5900. It is expected to only accept a password for auth, and said password should be exported as an environment variable, so that the container agent can access it. The server should also have remote resizing enabled, unless it's not suited for the use case.

Password

There are many ways to share the VNC password with the agent. The stock images export an environment variable that's a random string, and then vncpasswd is used to set the password.

#!/bin/bash
export VNCPASSWORD=$(openssl rand -base64 32)
echo $VNCPASSWORD | vncpasswd -f > /home/stardust/.vnc/passwd
vncserver -kill :1
vncserver :1 -passwd /home/stardust/.vnc/passwd -fg -localhost no
# Start the agent
tsx server/index.ts

System

The container should have a user named stardust, and it's home directory must also be able to be written to by the container agent. There should be a ~/Downloads and a ~/Uploads directory, which the container agent can use to transfer files to and from the container.