Web browser security settings prevent web pages from accessing local files using the normal request model. The solution is to serve the files from a local webserver. The following examples show catalog.json
as the name of the local catalog you wish to browse - substitute the name of your catalog file if it is different.
If you are accessing STAC Browser by running the npm start
command, you can run a local webserver using the http-server
package.
Install and run http-server
via the following command from the directory that contains the STAC files:
npx http-server -p 8000 --cors
You can then use the CLI option --catalogUrl="http://localhost:8000/catalog.json"
when starting STAC Browser.
If your catalog uses absolute file locations, you can use the stacProxyUrl
option to convert local file locations to local web browser URLs. For instance, if you are serving a catalog on the local file system at /home/user/catalog.json
, but want to serve the data out from a server located at http://localhost:8000/
, you can use --stacProxyUrl="/home/user;http://localhost:8000"
.
If you are using a hosted version of STAC Browser, such as the STAC Browser Demo by Radiant Earth, and your STAC files use relative URIs, you can run a local webserver. One possibility is to use the Node package described above. Another is to use this Python 3 script:
#!/usr/bin/env python3
from http.server import HTTPServer, SimpleHTTPRequestHandler, test
import sys
class CORSRequestHandler (SimpleHTTPRequestHandler):
def end_headers (self):
self.send_header('Access-Control-Allow-Origin', '*')
SimpleHTTPRequestHandler.end_headers(self)
if __name__ == '__main__':
test(CORSRequestHandler, HTTPServer, port=int(sys.argv[1]) if len(sys.argv) > 1 else 8000)
Save this script and run it from the directory that has your STAC Catalog. You can then use http://localhost:8000/catalog.json
as the URL to your STAC file.
If the above options don't work for you, you can run a fully-featured implementation of STAC Browser locally using the stactools-browse package for stactools. One short command gives you:
- STAC Browser running locally,
- a local webserver that serves your files to STAC Browser, and
- a local tile server that can serve web map tiles of images in your item assets.
stactools-browse
requires Docker to run.
Installation using pip: pip install stactools stactools-browse
Then run: stac browse catalog.json