This is an Ubuntu derived image containing GRASS GIS software.

Each branch in the git repository corresponds to a GRASS major version (e.g. 7.0) with the master branch following GRASS trunk. These branch names are reflected in the image tags on the Docker Index (e.g. branch 7.0 corresponds to the image geodata/grass:7.0).

Running the container without any arguments will output the grass help:

docker run geodata/grass

All arguments passed to the image are passed as options to grass, i.e. the following is equivalent to the previous invocation:

docker run geodata/grass --help

You will most likely want to work with data on the host system from within the docker container, in which case run the container with the -v option along the following lines:

docker run -it --rm -v $(pwd):/data geodata/grass -c /data/grassdb/here

The above command will create, in the current working directory on the host, the GRASS database grassdb and the GRASS location here with the default GRASS mapset of PERMANENT.

Running the following command in the future from the same current working directory will allow you to continue working with the data:

docker run -it --rm -v $(pwd):/data geodata/grass /data/grassdb/here/PERMANENT

This works because the current working directory is set to /data in the container, and you have mapped the current working directory on your host to /data.

You may want to create your own images based on specific versions of GRASS and GDAL, in which case clone the GRASS docker repository and edit the grass-checkout.txt and gdal-checkout.txt files to reference the desired versions. For example, the following will build GRASS 7.0.0 against GDAL 2.0.0:

git clone git://github.com/geo-data/grass-docker/ \
&& cd grass-docker \
&& echo "tags/release_20150220_grass_7_0_0" > grass-checkout.txt \
&& echo "2.0.0" > gdal-checkout.txt \
&& docker build -t geodata/grass:local .

tags/release_20150220_grass_7_0_0 references a specific checkout of the GRASS subversion repository.

Note that the image tagged geodata/grass:latest represents the latest code at the time the image was built. If you want to include the most up-to-date commits then you need to build the docker image yourself locally along these lines:

docker build -t geodata/grass:local git://github.com/geo-data/grass-docker/