Quick Start - local build

Windows setup

The commands on this page (and elsewhere in this “Quick Start” section) are written for a POSIX shell — build.sh, view.sh, and the raw docker run commands below all assume bash-style syntax (e.g. $(pwd)). There is currently no .bat/PowerShell equivalent, so on Windows you should run them from Git Bash (bundled with Git for Windows) or, for the smoothest experience, WSL with Docker Desktop’s WSL 2 integration enabled.

Quick how-to build locally

  1. Install Docker.
  2. Check out any valid Building Block implementation (e.g. bblocks-examples).
  3. cd into the checked-out directory.
  4. Run build.sh if present.
    • This runs the current build scripts and compiles the Building Blocks locally.
    • If not present, run the command directly (see Postprocessing overview for more details and options): 
      # Process building blocks
docker run -it --pull=always --rm --workdir /workspace -v "$(pwd):/workspace" \
ghcr.io/opengeospatial/bblocks-postprocess --clean true --base-url http://localhost:9090/register/
  5. Run view.sh to preview the local build.
    • If not present, run: 
      docker run --rm --pull=always -v "$(pwd):/register" -p 9090:9090 ghcr.io/ogcincubator/bblocks-viewer

You can now experiment with the source material, or proceed to create your own building blocks.

The output of the commands above is written to build-local, which is not tracked by git, so it will never interfere with commits or Pull Requests.

If instead you want to update an existing register and submit your changes upstream, work on a fork of the repository rather than a plain local checkout. Forks have their own concerns — most notably merge conflicts caused by the build/ directory that the automated postprocessing workflow commits on every push — covered in Contributing updates to Building Blocks.

Postprocessing a subset of Building Blocks

Add --filter {id} to the Docker build command, where {id} is a Building Block identifier such as ogc.bbr.examples.feature.externalSchema, to limit processing to a single Building Block.