Shell script to run TigerVNC server on the actual desktop (scraping).

TigerVNC server installed (tigervnc-scraping-server on debian)

The script checks, if you have already a .vnc Directory in your home ($HOME). You have to set a vnc password with the "vncpasswd" command, this will result a ~/.vnc/passwd file.
On debian, the default TigerVNC server binary for scraping is a symbolic link in /usr/bin/x0vncserver (where x0 means the Xsession at display :0). This x0vncserver is a 'dummy' version of the main TigerVNC server binary. Unlike the full version, this doesn't create a virtual display, instead it just shares the current X session at display :0.

The script runs in the background, creates a logfile (default ~/.vnc/logfile), where it stores the actual x0vncserver logging information. There is also a pid file, default ~/.vnc/${HOSTNAME}${DISPLAY}.pid where the process id is stored.

The default port is for the :0 display 5900. If you want to change it, just edit VNCPORT="5900" to whatever port you want the TigerVNC server to listen to.

startvnc start|stop|restart|status

start - will start the TigerVNC Server on display :0 (scraping) default on port 5900
stop - will kill the TigerVNC Server on display :0
restart - will restart the TigerVNC Server on display :0 (if it's not running, it will just start it)
status - will tell whether the TigerVNC Server is running or not

• $HOME/.vnc
  main TigerVNC server user directory (if it doesn't exist, create it with mkdir -p ~/.vnc)
• $HOME/.vnc/passwd
  password file for VNC Server (if it doesn't exist, create it with vncpasswd)
• $HOME/.vnc/logfile
  logfile location (created by script)
• $HOME/.vnc/hostname:0.pid
  pid file (created by script)

There's a command for killing the vnc server on the command line, by vncserver -kill :0 if the vnc server runs at the :0 display, reads the actual pid from the file and kills it.
However, this command looks for the pid file in your ~/.vnc directory.
The pid file format must be as following: ~/.vnc/${HOSTNAME}${DISPLAY}.pid

If you want to automatically start with the Xsession, you can put it to your ~/.xsessionrc Like this:

user@linux:~$ cat ~/.xsessionrc
/home/user/runvncserver/startvnc start >/dev/null 2>&1

For further information, please take a look at the TigerVNC server documentation files on

• x0vncserver documentation.
• vncpasswd documentation.
• vncserver documentation.
• vncconfig documentation.

In the future, I try to implement a separate logfile for the script, since the logfile stored in ~/.vnc/logfile has only the TigerVNC Server output.

Further, I want to test it on other linux systems, whether it is working there, too, since this script was written on a debian machine (Debian stretch). Feel free to write me if you have any issues on other distributions or architectures.

István Sebestyén-Teleki

Any patches or suggestions are welcome!