Vagrant¶

Author:	Howard Butler
Contact:	howard@hobu.co
Date:	10/27/2015

Introduction¶

Because of PDAL’s relatively short lifespan, there are not so many distributions and packaging solutions that have it available. This means that prospective users of PDAL are pretty much on their own to build up PDAL and use it. Folks who’ve climbed this mountain with other well-entangled software like GDAL, MapServer, or Mapnik should be able to manage the compilation challenges listed in the full set of dependencies in Unix Compilation.

For everyone else, suffering all of the compilation challenges, including at least three different build systems is simply too much. “Give me a binary and be done with it,” they might ask, and for them, there is an answer. Surrender the requirement of running PDAL in your own customized system for the buildout of PDAL on a known quantity – a pre-configured virtual machine.

Installation¶

Note

This document assumes you are starting with a basic Macintosh system because this is the only system the author assumes people could ever want to run :). This document has not been tested on any other platforms, but it is expected that things should work if you’re starting from Windows or some Linux.

Vagrant is configuration management for virtual machines. Its focus is on reproducibility of configuration. The idea is to codify the configuration using simple text files, press a button, and out spits a fully configured virtual machine with the specified options. And for the most part, this is what actually happens.

Vagrant is simply the configuration management software, however. VirtualBox is the virtual machine container. These two tools are used in concert, and both are required to complete this tutorial.

Download and install VirtualBox.
Download and install Vagrant.

Clone PDAL to your environment:

$ git clone https://github.com/PDAL/PDAL.git

Execute the vagrant configuration:
vagrant up
Wait ...
Wait ...
Wait ...

Look for the following when it’s all done:

vagrant@pdal-development:~$ pdal info --input readpgpointcloud.xml -p 0
{
    "X": "560974.95000000007",
    "Y": "5115235.6900000004",
    "Z": "1881.71",
    "Intensity": "0",
    "ReturnNumber": "0",
    "NumberOfReturns": "0",
    "ScanDirectionFlag": "0",
    "EdgeOfFlightLine": "0",
    "Classification": "2",
    "ScanAngleRank": "0",
    "UserData": "0",
    "PointSourceId": "21",
    "Time": "0",
    "Red": "248",
    "Green": "250",
    "Blue": "246",
    "PointID": "772536",
    "BlockID": "0"
}

Start playing around:

$ vagrant ssh
$ pdal

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
pdal (PDAL 0.9.9 (b632df) with GeoTIFF 1.4.0 GDAL 1.11dev LASzip 2.1.0 System )
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  available actions:
     - info
     - pipeline
     - query
     - translate

What you get¶

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

Full pgpointcloud support including example database
filters.hexbin
filters.reprojection
readers.nitf and writers.nitf
LASzip support in readers.las and writers.las
Interpolation with Points2Grid using writers.p2g
Python manipulation using filters.predicate and filters.programmable
PCL support via filters.pclblock, readers.pcd, writers.pcd, ground command, and pcl command
writers.geowave

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.