Hi Dave,

my Guacamole setup uses an extension that reads destinations from another 
service that instruments VMs based on users authorizations, even manages VM 
lifecycle.

Would it be feasible to have an extension concept similar to Guacamole? Are you 
supporting also UI extensions?

The current java based Guacamole is kind of heavy, and moving to Rust could 
also be interesting just to learn the language.

Regards,

Joachim

 

Von: Dave Kempe <[email protected]> 
Gesendet: Montag, 9. Februar 2026 20:29
An: [email protected]
Betreff: Re: Introducing rustguac - a guacamole-client replacement written in 
rust

 

Hi Joachim,

the address book feature is backed by hashicorp vault or openbao. So you need 
to set that up first if you want to use the address book. I realise that is a 
kinda heavy lift for some people, but I'm aiming to have this be security 
focused and that means not having credentials to remote machines stored on disk 
or on the same machine even. Once you have vault setup, its pretty easy - you 
give rustguac an approle, and it will connect to vault and manage your address 
book entries. It works without vault for adhoc entries, so you can give it a go 
with just adhoc sessions.

 

https://github.com/sol1/rustguac/blob/main/docs/integrations.md#vault--openbao-address-book

 

A neat side effect of this approach is that you can have multiple rustguac 
instances use a shared address book, and still have instance specific 
addresses. Vault is just like a super secure database.

 

Dave

 

 

On Tue, 10 Feb 2026 at 05:38, Joachim Lindenberg <[email protected] 
<mailto:[email protected]> > wrote:

Hi Dave,

where do you maintain the “targets” guacd is supposed to connect to? in Apache 
Guacamole this is usually in a database or via some extension plugin. Anything 
similar?

Thanks,

Joachim

 

Von: Dave Kempe <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > 
Gesendet: Samstag, 7. Februar 2026 03:55
An: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> 
Betreff: Introducing rustguac - a guacamole-client replacement written in rust

 

Hi everyone,

I have been using Guacamole for years, and I want to thank the dev team for all 
the hard work they have put in not only writing a great product that I and my 
business rely on, but in support and docs and planning and all that thankless 
stuff. Well done.

 

I have wanted to change out the frontend of guacamole for years, and I knew it 
was possible, and kinda managed to do that. I suspect there are other 
commercial products that have kinda done the same thing as I have done with 
this little project.

 

So I had a crack and here we are:

https://github.com/sol1/rustguac

 

Lightweight Rust replacement for Apache Guacamole — browser-based SSH, RDP, and 
web sessions via guacd 

I have added a few very opinionated choices and features:

* Hashicorp Vault is the only address book backend

* OIDC is the only authentication method for users - API first for machines

* Web sessions are a browser URL and VNC

* No VNC support at this stage (can add it if someone asks)

* Lots of other security first features, like TLS everywhere, LUKS for drives, 
etc.

 

I'm currently running some fuzzing on the codebase, so development is ongoing, 
but there are packages and docker images ready to go.

 

Anyway, I hope I'm not overstepping by sharing this here. I am happy to have 
feedback and again, thanks for all the great work you do. Hopefully rustguac 
becomes a little cousin to guacamole, and is eventually invited for family 
dinner.

 

Dave Kempe

 

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