Dockerized Tippecanoe

This is a Docker image for Mapbox's Tippecanoe, based on Alpine Linux.

The currently built version at the latest tag is 1.14.4.

• Small: just 21.5MB total
• Safe: run as an unprivileged, non-root user
• Flexible: elevate to root with sudo to install more packages

Usage

Run with docker run, mounting a local directory or use Docker volumes as needed wth -v. See below for specific examples. By default, processes will be run with the tippecanoe user in its home directory: /home/tippecanoe.

Interactive Mode with bash

Bash comes preinstalled and will run as the default entrypoint.

docker run -it -v $HOME/tippecanoe:/home/tippecanoe jskeates/tippecanoe:latest
bash-4.3$ tippecanoe -h
tippecanoe: unrecognized option: h
Usage: tippecanoe --output=output.mbtiles [--name=...] [--layer=...]
...

Non-interactive: Directly Invoke Tippecanoe

Alternatively, you can run tippecanoe directly. This is more useful in a script running on the host.

docker run -it -v $HOME/tippecanoe:/home/tippecanoe jskeates/tippecanoe:latest tippecanoe -o output.mbtiles input.geojson

Disable sudo

For additional safety (for example, running in a production, scripted process), you can disable accessing the root user via sudo.

You can achieve this by mounting /dev/null to /etc/sudoers inside the container.

docker run -it -v $HOME/tippecanoe:/home/tippecanoe -v /dev/null:/etc/sudoers jskeates/tippecanoe:latest
bash-4.3$ sudo apk update
sudo: /etc/sudoers is not a regular file
sudo: no valid sudoers sources found, quitting
sudo: unable to initialize policy plugin

Building A Different Version

To build a different version of Tippecanoe, set the TIPPECANOE_RELEASE build-arg when building the image:

docker build --build-arg TIPPECANOE_RELEASE=1.14.0 .

Note that different versions may have different dependency requirements, so the build may fail, or the build output may be broken.