Installing Guacamole

There are two supported ways of installing Guacamole:

Installing Guacamole natively

This involves installing a servlet container like Apache Tomcat, deploying the Guacamole web application beneath Tomcat, and building at least guacamole-server from source.

Installing Guacamole using Docker containers

This involves running a pair of Docker containers using the provided guacamole/guacamole and guacamole/guacd Docker images.

A typical, standard installation of Guacamole is configured to use a database for storage and/or authentication. This provides the most features and flexibility, and enables a convenient web-based administrative interface.

Other, more complex authentication methods which use LDAP, various multi-factor authentication and single sign-on options, etc. are discussed in a separate, dedicated chapters.

Note

There is also a “default” authentication method that reads all users and connections from a single file called user-mapping.xml. This simpler, built-in authentication method is not intended for production use, but rather to serve as a relatively-easy means of verifying that Guacamole has been properly set up.

It’s reasonable to use this XML-based method for small deployments that don’t need the full feature set of Guacamole, but the goal should always be to migrate to a production-ready mechanism like using a database. We do not recommend using user-mapping.xml for production or anything public-facing.