• Tutorials
• Containerized SUMO GUI

This tutorial shows how to run the SUMO GUI from inside a docker container.

Introduction#

This tutorial demonstrates how to use the SUMO GUI without installing the software on your local machine.

Getting the docker image#

You can either get the latest docker image from the SUMO docker registry by using

  docker pull ghcr.io/eclipse-sumo/sumo:latest
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or build your own local version of the image by checking out the SUMO repository and executing:

  cd build_config/docker
  docker build -t ghcr.io/eclipse-sumo/sumo:latest -f Dockerfile.ubuntu.git .
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Starting the container#

This section describes how to start the container.

It is only necessary to start a single container. We will then launch the required applications from the command-line.

Linux#

This section assumes, you are either running X11 as your primary window system or a wayland compositor compatible with X11 (e.g. Weston). SUMO does currently not work with Wayland and requires some compatibility with X11 (see also flathub/org.eclipse.sumo#15).

Most distributions fulfill this requirement by default, so if you are unsure about this, try proceeding.

To allow graphical applications to run from inside the docker container, we need to do two things:

• transfer the information which display to use with -e DISPLAY=$DISPLAY -v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix:rw
• transfer the information for authorizing into the container with -e XAUTHORITY=$XAUTHORITY -v $XAUTHORITY:$XAUTHORITY

We also need a directory to store our results persistent. In this example we are using ~/sumo-projs for this.

So in total the command for starting the container looks like this:

mkdir -p ~/sumo-projs/
docker run \
    -e DISPLAY=$DISPLAY -v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix:rw \
    -e XAUTHORITY=$XAUTHORITY -v $XAUTHORITY:$XAUTHORITY \
    -v ~/sumo-projs/:/sumo-projs \
    --workdir /sumo-projs \
    -it \
    ghcr.io/eclipse-sumo/sumo:latest bash
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You will then have a shell, where you can start the GUI applications. E.g. by typing netedit or sumo-gui.

Windows#

Start your X-Server (e.g. VcXsrv) and check the setting for "Disable access control" (by this, the setup gets a lot easier). To then tell the applications in the container to use this X-Server, we add -e DISPLAY=host.docker.internal:0 to the command-line.

We also need a directory to store our results persistent. In this example we are using C:\sumo-projs for this.

So in total the command for starting the container looks like this:

docker run \
    -e DISPLAY=host.docker.internal:0
    -v C:\sumo-projs:/sumo-projs \
    --workdir /sumo-projs \
    -it \
    ghcr.io/eclipse-sumo/sumo:latest bash
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You will then have a shell, where you can start the GUI applications. E.g. by typing netedit or sumo-gui.

Creating and Running the Simulation#

Follow the steps from Hello SUMO using this GUI and save the resulting files in /sumo-projs, so they are saved in a persistent location.

Further Reading#

You can try more of the Tutorials with the docker image.