Docker for GUI-based environments on windows

Question

i am trying to make a dockerfile to opencv social distance detection project as a requirement to school project

the problem that i had is to make docker run on GUI-based environment

somehow i managed to make it work on linux by adding the fellow line to the run command

-e DISPLAY=$DISPLAY -v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix:ro

the full command

sudo docker run -e DISPLAY=$DISPLAY -v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix:ro social-distance-detection -y https://youtu.be/hTUyzF4v9KA

but it did not work on windows

which command should i add to docker run so it can run on windows ? and by any chance is there a way to make it even work without adding any extra line ?

there is the Dockerfile

FROM ubuntu:20.04
FROM python:3.8

LABEL maintainer="muhammed akyuzlu ***@gmail.com"

ADD Social-distance-detection.py / 
ADD coco.names / 
ADD yolov4.cfg /    
ADD yolov4.weights /  




RUN apt-get update \
    && apt-get install -y \
    python3-pyqt5 \
    build-essential \
    cmake \
    git \
    wget \
    unzip \
    yasm \
    pkg-config \
    libswscale-dev \
    libtbb2 \
    libtbb-dev \
    libjpeg-dev \
    libpng-dev \
    libtiff-dev \
    libavformat-dev \
    libpq-dev \
    xserver-xephyr\
    && rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/*

RUN apt-get update -y \ 
    && apt-get install python3-pip -y \
    && pip install pafy \
    && pip install numpy  \
    && pip install youtube-dl \
    && pip install numpy \
    && pip install opencv-python 


ENTRYPOINT ["python","./Social-distance-detection.py"] 

it is my first time with Docker so you could find some nonsense lines :)

Answer 1

First, clean up your Dockerfile. I would suggest:

FROM python:3.8

LABEL maintainer="muhammed akyuzlu ***@gmail.com"

COPY Social-distance-detection.py / 
COPY coco.names / 
COPY yolov4.cfg /    
COPY yolov4.weights /  

RUN apt-get update && \
    apt-get -y install \
    build-essential \
    cmake \
    git \
    wget \
    unzip \
    yasm \
    pkg-config \
    libswscale-dev \
    libtbb2 \
    libtbb-dev \
    libjpeg-dev \
    libpng-dev \
    libtiff-dev \
    libavformat-dev \
    libpq-dev \
    xserver-xephyr && \
    apt-get -y clean && \
    rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/* && \
    pip install --no-cache-dir pafy \
    numpy  \
    youtube-dl \
    PyQt5 \
    opencv-python 

ENTRYPOINT [ "python" , "./Social-distance-detection.py" ] 

I'm not going to repeat my comment to your question, but as for other changes - you should use COPY, rather than ADD, unless you need ADD-specific features. You should only run apt-get install once, then clean up all temporary files and caches. You should run pip with --no-cache-dir switch to avoid creating unnecessary caches in the first place.

Now for your actual question. As @David Maze suggested you need to install X Window Server, then configure it to accept all connections and finally run:

docker run -e DISPLAY=192.168.1.68:0.0 social-distance-detection -y https://youtu.be/hTUyzF4v9KA

replacing 192.168.1.68 with your host's IP address.

The process is described in detail in this article.