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Cassini

Installation and Setup

This document will guide you to install Cassini and all its dependencies on your machine.

Installing with Docker

A Docker image with all the dependecies already installed is provided on Docker Hub : nicorio42/cassini. This makes it possible to run cassini with Docker , without having to install PDAL and GDAL .

First you will need to install Docker . Got to the project’s front page, hover the “Download Docker Desktop” dropdown and select your operating system. Then follow the instructions and/or the installation wizard.

To check if Docker installation worked, open a terminal and type:

docker -v

This should print the version of Docker .

Then you can use Cassini by replacing the cassini command with:

On the command prompt:

docker run --rm -it -v "%cd%":/app nicorio42/cassini

On Powershell:

docker run --rm -it --name cassini -v "${PWD}:/app" nicorio42/cassini

So for example, if your terminal is in a directory with a LiDAR file named tile.laz, you can run:

On the command prompt:

docker run --rm -it -v "%cd%":/app nicorio42/cassini process tile.laz

On Powershell:

docker run --rm -it --name cassini -v "${PWD}:/app" nicorio42/cassini process tile.laz

The first time you will use the command, it will download the nicorio42/cassini Docker image which might take some minutes.

For convenience, you can define a cassini function that will wrap the docker command:

First open Powershell as an admin user and authorize script execution:

set-executionpolicy unrestricted

Then open Powershell and execute:

if (!(Test-Path -Path $PROFILE)) {
  New-Item -ItemType File -Path $PROFILE -Force
}

This will create a PowerShell profile (the equivalent of a .bashrc in Powershell) if it doesn’t exist yet. Then execute the following command to edit this PowerShell profile:

notepad $PROFILE

Add the following PowerShell function in your profile script and save it:

function cassini {
  docker run --rm -it --name cassini -v "${PWD}:/app" nicorio42/cassini $args
}

Then you will be able to use the cassini command:

cassini process tile.laz

To update Cassini to the latest version, pull the latest nicorio42/cassini image:

docker pull nicorio42/cassini:latest

Then run this command to remove the previous image:

docker image prune -a

Installing with Conda

Installing PDAL and GDAL

Cassini uses the PDAL and the GDAL libraries to process LiDAR and Shapefile data. To use Cassini, you first need to install them on your machine.

The easiest way to install PDAL and GDAL is with Miniconda . Bellow are some command line instructions reproduced from Miniconda documentation to quickly install miniconda:

These three commands quickly and quietly install the latest 64-bit version of the installer and then clean up after themselves. To install a different version or architecture of Miniconda for Windows, change the name of the .exe installer in the curl command.

curl https://repo.anaconda.com/miniconda/Miniconda3-latest-Windows-x86_64.exe -o miniconda.exe
start /wait "" miniconda.exe /S
del miniconda.exe

After installing, open the “Anaconda Prompt (miniconda3)” program to use Miniconda3. For the Powershell version, use “Anaconda Powershell Prompt (miniconda3)”.

After following these instructions, the conda command should be available in you terminal. To check that everything worked:

conda --version

This should print the version of the conda program.

Then create a new miniconda environment named cassini with pdal and gdal installed:

conda create --yes --name cassini --channel conda-forge pdal gdal

Everytime you will open a new terminal and want to use Cassini, you will have to activate this environment:

conda activate cassini

Downloading Cassini executable

Download the binary file corresponding to your Operating System:

Decompress it and copy the cassini executable where you want to use it on your machine.

If you want to make the cassini command globally available on you machine, you can follow this tutorial.