Kasm Workspaces on fly.io - Having Trouble

Questions / Help
6

No worries. I can give you a rough sketch:

To start with, try deploying the image locally (makes debugging easier). Follow the “docker cli” instructions on https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/kasm.

Once you get that working, the basic command to deploy the image to Fly is fly launch --image linuxserver/kasm, but there are complications:

  1. The image starts a setup wizard on port 3000 for setting passwords etc. You’ll need to access that wizard using port forwarding (fly proxy), or find a way to automate the setup (see here for how the wizard sets the passwords).

  2. Kasm only supports HTTPS out of the box (issue), which is a pain because the normal setup on Fly is to have Fly do the the TLS termination and talk to your app using HTTP. Some options:
    (a) As a temporary hack, use fly proxy to access Kasm’s port 443 directly, as with the wizard.
    (b) Run a reverse proxy that listens on port 8080 for HTTP connections and forwards them to port 443 using HTTPS; see using Kasm’s reverse proxy configuration.
    (c) Disable SSL by modifying the image. See the linked issue for some helpful comments.

  3. You’ll want to use persistent volumes, because anything outside a persistent volume will be lost when the Fly VM restarts. Based on the image documentation it looks like /opt should be on a persistent volume, and I’m guessing Kasm’s PostgreSQL database (which has the passwords etc.) will also need to be on a persistent volume.

When you get stuck, post the full steps you used and the full error messages.