Document Installation via CLI

The installation instructions for importer-exporter here and here explain how to install the client by using the Universal Installer Package. These instructions depend on the existence of an interactive desktop environment.

Since importer-exporter now supports cli mode, where you can use it in bash scripts, it is probable that a common emerging use case will be deployment of the importer-exporter in data pipelining jobs on servers with no desktop interface.

Consequently, it would be great if this project could document the installation of this tool via the command line interface.

It would be especially useful if a reference Dockerfile could be released that allows us to use an importer-exporter docker image in exec mode. For an example of this, see the minio mc docker image, which behaves like a regular executable.

This would enable users to embed importer-exporter functionality into workflows on job scheduling applications like Apache Airflow.

[BWibo]

Hey there, the 3DCityDB Docker image does NOT include the ImporterExporter, but I created a separate image for the ImporterExporter. I haven’t published the repo jet, as I didn’t find time to complete the documentation jet. I will quickly add a note that this is work in progress and switch the repo to public. You can find the Dockerfile here in a few minutes. https://github.com/tum-gis/3dcitydb-importer-exporter-docker If you have problems/need support please open an issue at this repo. Closing this, feel free to reopen if required.

[clausnagel]

Thanks for your kind feedback, @EricBoix, and for pointing to your Jinja2 code generator. Cool stuff 😃

We are aware that requiring an XML config file to be able to use the CLI of the Importer/Exporter is not very user-friendly, especially in a Docker environment. As stated above, we want to rework the CLI so that it offers more parameters that allow for triggering imports and exports without the need for an additional config file. On the other hand, if we map every setting that is possible with the config file to separate command-line parameters, the list of parameters will be (too?) big.

So, we are currently looking for the most important parameters that support the most typical import and export scenarios. Feel free to contribute your requirements in this issue #139.