Docker

Author:Howard Butler
Contact:howard@hobu.co
Date:01/07/2015

Introduction

It’s a giant pain to build everything yourself. To make it simpler to use PDAL, a build based on Docker is also available. This document describes how to use it to operate on your own data.

See also

The What is Docker document describes in more detail what exactly Docker is. Think of it as a virtualization platform that doesn’t have to be “built” every time from scratch like a Vagrant build would.

Getting Started

Install Docker Toolbox.

Docker starting documentation can be found at the following links. Read through them a bit for your platform so you have an idea what to expect.

Note

This tutorial will assume you are running on Windows, but the same commands should work in OSX or Linux too – though definition of file paths might provide a significant difference.

Run Docker Quickstart Terminal

Docker is most easily accessed using a terminal window that it configures with environment variables and such. Double-click on the “Docker Quickstart Terminal” link on your desktop (Windows) or run the “Docker Quickstart Terminal” application (Mac).

After some text scrolls by, you should see something like the following image :

../_images/docker-quickstart-terminal.png

To be sure Docker is working correctly and everything is happy, issue the following command and confirm that it reports similar information:

docker-machine env default
../_images/docker-quickstart-env.png

Fetch PDAL Image

The PDAL image provides a recent master branch build of PDAL. It is pushed to Docker Hub periodically by the PDAL developers. We need to pull it locally so we can use it to run PDAL commands. Once it is pulled, we don’t have to pull it again unless we want to refresh it for whatever reason.

docker pull pdal/pdal

Note

Other PDAL versions are provided at the same Docker Hub location, with an expected tag name (ie pdal/1.1, or pdal/1.x) for major PDAL versions. The PDAL Docker hub location at https://hub.docker.com/u/pdal/ has images and more information on this topic.

Fetch Sample Data

We need some sample data to play with, so we’re going to download the autzen.laz file to your C:/Users/Howard drive. Inside the Quickstart Terminal, issue the following curl command:

curl -O http://www.liblas.org/samples/autzen/autzen.laz

Note

That’s a capital Oh, not a zero.

List the directory to be sure that it was downloaded

ls *.laz

What you get

The configuration that PDAL provides contains nearly every possible feature except for Oracle Point Cloud support. Things it includes are:

Head to Pipeline for more information on using PDAL pipelines. Two pipelines are provided in /home/vagrant that are used to load the st-helens-small.las file into pgpointcloud.