Is there interest in a community guide: Sunshine on Wayland in a headless systemd-nspawn container (no dummy plug)

[joleuger]

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Hi Sunshine community,
Hi Sunshine devs,

I’m running Sunshine in a somewhat uncommon setup and wanted to ask whether there would be interest in a short community guide documenting it.

Setup overview (working reliably):

• Sunshine running on Wayland
• Fully headless, no HDMI / dummy plug
• Inside a systemd-nspawn container
• Host handles GPU access, container runs the Wayland session
• Input forwarded via vuinputd
• OS: Ubuntu 24.04

This might be useful for people looking to:

• Run Sunshine containerized but without X11 or dummy displays
• Keep the host clean while still supporting Wayland
• Use container-friendly input injection

I noticed that docs/guides.md currently points mainly to the community blog. Before writing anything up, I wanted to ask:

• Would a how-to like this be welcome as a community guide?

• If so, would you prefer it as:

  • a section in docs/guides.md,
  • a link in docs/guides.md to an external Markdown document in amygithub repository, or
  • a blog post on LizardByte.github.io linked from there?

Happy to adapt the scope/format to whatever fits best, or just keep it as a reference-style guide if that’s preferred.

Thanks for all the work on Sunshine — it’s been great to build on.

EDIT: My current draft is available on https://github.com/joleuger/containerized-headless-sunshine-howto. Once, it is ready, I will post a PR.

[ReenigneArcher]

Hello @joleuger!

Yes, I think this would be a great addition! My personal preference would be that it be a blog post. We use jekyll to build our website and blog. The format is pretty straight forward, but please let me know if you have any questions.

You can see other examples of community guides here: https://github.com/LizardByte/LizardByte.github.io/tree/master/_posts/guides-community

And examples of all our posts here: https://github.com/LizardByte/LizardByte.github.io/tree/master/_posts

[KaiStarkk]

Agreed this would be excellent.
I also ran into several issues trying to get headless streaming set up with consumer hardware: everything from running it in a different tty console via CHVT (causes issues as consumer cards don't allow multiple DRM master graphical sessions, so the desktop crashes when switching back to main VT), to using hyprland's headless display creation / deletion in the prep do/undo commands (doesn't work because the prep command runs after display selection), to creating a persistent compositor buffer with wlr-screencopy and keeping it alive while disabling the headless monitor to persist the ability to render. Getting it working was a lot of trial and error, still not sure it's bug free, so a method that works consistently would be good for other users starting from square 1.