Vroom + ORS

For a recent work project I have been using openrouteservice and the Vehicle Routing Open-source Optimization Machine (vroom) to conduct a route analysis for a client interested in evaluating new warehouse locations for shipping. Configuring this software gave me a huge amount of trouble - I was finally able to get things working using the info below, which I also posted at https://github.com/VROOM-Project/vroom-docker/issues/27.

As an absolute novice at Docker I suffered for many hours trying to set up Vroom + openrouteservice and finally got my installation working.

Here are the main things I needed to fix to get this to work:

ors and vroom must be on the same Docker network to talk to each other. You can do this in two ways: either start both containers separately, creating a new docker network via the docker network create command, and then connect both containers to the network using the docker network connect commend. even better, add vroom to the ORS docker-compose file. I added the following lines to my docker-compose file:

# ----------------- Vroom application configuration ------------------- #
  vroom:
    image: ghcr.io/vroom-project/vroom-docker:v1.14.0
    ports:
      - "3000:3000"
    volumes:
      - ./vroom-conf:/conf
    environment:
      VROOM_ROUTER: ors

The default port in the Vroom config file did not work for me. I had to change the port from 8080 to 8082. I troubleshooted the port by opening up a terminal within the Docker vroom container and running curl requests at the ors-app container until I found a port that connected - I'm sure there is a better way. I also had to change the name of host to "ors-app" to match the name of my ORS docker container. In my Vroom config file I ended up with the following lines:

routingServers:
  ors:
    driving-car:
      # host: '0.0.0.0/ors/v2'
      # port: '8080'
      host: 'ors-app/ors/v2'
      port: '8082'

This gave me a giant amount of trouble but I now have Vroom and ORS running locally. For other novices, I highly recommend following the Docker tutorials and paying special attention to the "multi-container apps" tutorial. I really wanted to avoid having to learn Docker for this but it ended up helping me understand the issues I was facing.