Street Network Analysis in a Docker Container

Containerization is the way of the future present. I’ve heard feedback from some folks over the past few months who would like to play around with OSMnx for street network analysis, transport modeling, and urban design—but can’t because they can’t install Python and its data science stack on their computers. Furthermore, it would be nice to have a consistent reference environment to deploy on AWS or elsewhere in the cloud.

So, I’ve created a docker image containing OSMnx, Jupyter, and the rest of the Python geospatial data science stack, available on docker hub alongside additional usage instructions. If you’re starting from scratch, you can get started in four simple steps:

First, install docker.

Second, open a command prompt and change directories to a folder containing a Jupyter notebook that you’d like to run, such as these.

Third, run this command (note: if you’re on Windows, replace “$PWD” with %cd%):

docker run --rm -it --name osmnx -p 8888:8888 -v "$PWD":/home/jovyan/work gboeing/osmnx

Finally, visit http://localhost:8888 in your broswer to launch Jupyter Lab.

You now have access to Jupyter Lab running inside the container, with OSMnx, networkx, igraph, geopandas, pysal, matplotlib, and the rest of the geospatial data science stack. Any changes you make to your notebook will be saved to your local file system even though the container is ephemeral. For more info, you can read more about OSMnx here or read about the image on docker hub.