I recently joined the Google Earth Engine developer community. I have been successfully using a new method I developed (publication pending!) for exploring remotely-sensed data of emergent sandbars, and I want to explore its applicability to other systems. Google Earth Engine’s massive data catalog and Python interface is an obvious choice of test environment, and it’s pretty easy to get started.

The developer interface is provided via a Docker container, and it’s fairly straightforward to run the container locally, which lets you run stuff offline and avoid cloud computing costs. Getting the standard docker container up and running is fairly simple, provided you have access to hardware virtualization. In my case, I upgraded my Windows 10 Home edition to Education edition, which I was able to get for free from my university. It was then a simple matter of enabling hardware virtualization in my system BIOS and installing Docker Community Edition. Simply copying and pasting Google’s instructions got me up and running (once I realized that I needed to run the commands in terminal, not PowerShell!).

The method I want to test out relies on some modules that aren’t part of the standard Python distribution, and they aren’t included in the GEE container. However, it’s not straightforward (at least to me) to install additional stuff in an existing container. In general, it’s better to build a custom container that installs any extra stuff from the get-go (this makes your container more portable).

Despite never having used Docker before, I managed to build a custom container based on the GEE image (with some assistance from a friendly StackOverflow user). I’ve written out instructions below, but honestly I don’t really know what all the steps mean.

1. Follow Google’s instructions. to get a feel getting GEE set up locally. You should end up with a folder “datalab-ee” in your workspace (for me, it’s in C:\Users\michael\workspace).

2. Create a new folder in your workspace. I named my container datalab-mk, so I made a folder C:\Users\michael\workspace\datalab-mk.

3. Create a file Dockerfile (no extension) in the datalab-mk folder with the following contents:

   FROM gcr.io/earthengine-project/datalab-ee:latest
   WORKDIR C:/Users/michael/workspace/datalab-ee-mk
   COPY . .
   RUN pip install -r requirements.txt
   

   The GEE image includes pip, so last line lets you install additional Python modules in the container. I think the COPY command will copy any additional files you placed in the container folder into the container environment.

4. Create a file requirements.txt in the datalab-mk folder. This file contains the list of Python modules to install. For example, my requirements.txt file contains the following line:

   networkx==1.11
   

   which installs the Python module networkx (version 1.11).

5. Run the new container with this slight modification to the workspace setup and container creation instructions (note the references to datalab-mk):

   set "GCP_PROJECT_ID=YOUR_PROJECT_ID"
   set "CONTAINER_IMAGE_NAME=datalab:mk"
   set "HOME=%HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%"
   set "WORKSPACE=%HOME%\workspace\datalab-ee-mk"
   mkdir "%WORKSPACE%"
   cd %WORKSPACE%
   
   docker run -it -p "127.0.0.1:8081:8080" -v "%WORKSPACE%:/content" -e "PROJECT_ID=%GCP_PROJECT_ID%" %CONTAINER_IMAGE_NAME%
   

6. Follow the authentication instructions as normal.

And that’s it! Now you have a GEE container with an additional Python module. At this point, you can further customize the Dockerfile to set up additional software or do other fancy stuff. There is some pretty decent information on best practices for Dockerfiles that I’ll be making heavy use of. But I think I’m over the hurdle and will be able to add the customizations I need to apply my methods to GEE data.