CLIFF Docker

The official Docker image for the CLIFF-CLAVIN geolocation software. If you want to run this yourself, grab and run the prebuilt image from the rahulbot/cliff-clavin project on DockerHub.

Note: CLAVIN, and by extension CLIFF, is very memory hungry due to the geonames index. To properly run, a minimum of 4GB of RAM is necessary. Any less and you'll experience errors.

Running Via DockerHub

The quickest path to running CLIFF is to fetch the latest release from DockerHub:

docker pull rahulbot/cliff-clavin:2.6.1
docker run -p 8080:8080 -m 8G -d rahulbot/cliff-clavin:2.6.1

Then just hit a URL like this to see some JSON results:

http://localhost:8080/cliff-2.6.1/parse/text?q=This%20is%20some%20text%20about%20New%20York%20City,%20and%20maybe%20about%20Accra%20as%20well,%20and%20maybe%20Boston%20as%20well.

Notes:

• It can take a minute the first time to load everything into memory)
• You can use our official Python API client library to fetch results programmatically

Building and Running Yourself

If you don't want to use the prebuilt image, you can build this image yourself using Docker:

docker build -t cliff .

Run it with enough memory, and sticking to port 8080:

docker run -p 8080:8080 -m 8G cliff

(see the "Notes" section above for how to fetch results)

Debugging

This takes a lot of memory, so if it doesn't work keep an eye on the docker log for "java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space" errors.

Releasing to Docker Hub

I build and release this to DockerHub for easier deployment on your server. To release the latest code I run:

docker build -t rahulbot/cliff-clavin .
docker push rahulbot/cliff-clavin

To release a tagged version, I something like this run:

docker build -t rahulbot/cliff-clavin:2.6.1 .
docker push rahulbot/cliff-clavin:2.6.1

Acknowledgements

This is forked from John Beieler's cliff-docker, which pulls heavily from Andy Halterman's CLIFF-up Vagrant box.