Here Be Dragons 🌍 🐲

A helpful Docker image for bleeding-edge spatial data analysis in Python.

We build the low-level C binaries from source so you don't have to. These images are built on top of Ubuntu Linux and the most recent versions of Python, Arrow, GDAL, GEOS, and PROJ.

The Python package manager uv is pre-installed and the recommended way to install additional packages. git, pip, and Pixi are also included.

Getting Started

You will need to install Docker.

On Windows, we recommend using Docker Desktop and Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).

Latest 🐍 Python 3.14.1

This is the stable version intended for production work.

To pull and start the container in your terminal:

docker run -it --name here-be-dragons-latest ghcr.io/corbel-spatial/here-be-dragons:latest

After the image downloads and opens a terminal you can check which packages are already installed by running:

uv pip list

geopandas and common dependencies are pre-installed, which you can check with:

python -c "import geopandas; geopandas.show_versions()"

To install additional packages use uv pip install --system, for example:

uv pip install --system geojson duckdb sedonadb

To update and restart the stopped container:

docker pull ghcr.io/corbel-spatial/here-be-dragons:latest
docker start here-be-dragons-latest
docker attach here-be-dragons-latest

These are the current included versions of the binaries and the packages built with them:

Binary Source	Python Packages
Arrow (22.0.0)	pyarrow (22.0.0) geoarrow-pyarrow (0.2)
GDAL (3.12.0)	osgeo / gdal (3.12.0)
GEOS (3.14.1)	shapely (2.1.2)
PROJ (9.7.1)	gdal (3.12.0) pyproj (3.7.2)

Next 🔥 Python 3.15.0a1

This is the experimental version intended for testing Arrow, GDAL, GEOS, and PROJ against the latest pre-release version of Python, and with and other packages in development.

The extra Python packages (geopandas, etc.) are not included. Unstable source branches will be used if they are needed for a successful build.

docker run -it --name here-be-dragons-next ghcr.io/corbel-spatial/here-be-dragons:next

⚠️ Note: Arrow cannot yet build successfully on Python 3.15 so it is not included ⚠️

Binary Source	Python Packages
Arrow	🚧
GDAL (3.12.0)	osgeo / gdal (3.12.0)
GEOS (3.14.0)	shapely (2.1.2)
PROJ (9.7.0)	gdal (3.12.0) pyproj (3.7.2)

📑 References

Project	Source	Downstream Packages
Arrow	https://github.com/apache/arrow	geoarrow-pyarrow
GDAL	https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal	Python bindings
GEOS	https://github.com/libgeos/geos	Shapely
PROJ	https://github.com/OSGeo/PROJ	Pyproj
Python (release schedule)	https://github.com/python/cpython	uv, Pixi, pip
Ubuntu	Docker image ubuntu:latest