🌍 Here Be Dragons 🐲

A helpful Docker image for bleeding-edge spatial data analysis in Python.

Tricky dependencies are built from source so you can run the latest geoprocessing libraries that depend on Python, Arrow, GDAL, GEOS, and PROJ.

The images are built on top of the most recent Ubuntu release (ubuntu:rolling). The Python package managers uv and Pixi are pre-installed.

Tip

You will need to install Docker. On Windows, running Docker Desktop with Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is recommended.

🐍 Latest

This Docker image is the stable version intended for production work with common geospatial libraries in the latest version of Python.

To pull and start the container in your terminal:

docker run -it --name here-be-dragons-latest ghcr.io/corbel-spatial/here-be-dragons:latest

After the image downloads and opens a terminal you can see which packages are already installed by running:

uv pip list

geopandas and common dependencies are pre-installed, which you can check with:

python -c "import geopandas; geopandas.show_versions()"

To install additional packages use uv pip install --system, for example:

uv pip install --system geojson duckdb sedonadb

To update and restart the stopped container:

docker pull ghcr.io/corbel-spatial/here-be-dragons:latest
docker start here-be-dragons-latest
docker attach here-be-dragons-latest

🔥 Next

This Docker image is the experimental version intended for testing the latest pre-release version of Python against Arrow, GDAL, GEOS, and PROJ. Failing builds might indicate that issues are on the horizon. Extra packages (geopandas, etc.) may not be included in this image.

docker run -it --name here-be-dragons-next ghcr.io/corbel-spatial/here-be-dragons:next

⚠️ TODO

• Scheduled automatic update of versions.env to find new releases/tags
• Add latest-dev and next-dev tags that keep all the build dependencies
• Images should run as non-root user
• Create a benchmark suite and check new releases for performance regressions
• Add more packages upon request - please open an issue!

📚 References

Project	Source	Downstream Packages
Arrow	https://github.com/apache/arrow	geoarrow-pyarrow
GDAL	https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal	Python bindings
GEOS	https://github.com/libgeos/geos	Shapely
PROJ	https://github.com/OSGeo/PROJ	Pyproj
Python (release schedule)	https://github.com/python/cpython	uv, Pixi
Ubuntu	https://hub.docker.com/_/ubuntu	n/a