How to write Shapely geometries to shapefiles?

Question

Can someone demonstrate a simple way to write geometry data-structures from shapely into shapefiles? I am particularly interested in polygons with holes and linestrings. It would also be beneficial to stay away from arcpy (so osgeo, pyshp, etc. would all be better).

Answer 1

Well-known binary is a good binary exchange format that can be exchanged with plenty of GIS software, including Shapely and GDAL/OGR.

This is a tiny example of the workflow:

from osgeo import ogr
from shapely.geometry import Polygon

# Here's an example Shapely geometry
poly = Polygon([(0, 0), (0, 1), (1, 1), (0, 0)])

# Now convert it to a shapefile with OGR    
driver = ogr.GetDriverByName('Esri Shapefile')
ds = driver.CreateDataSource('my.shp')
layer = ds.CreateLayer('', None, ogr.wkbPolygon)
# Add one attribute
layer.CreateField(ogr.FieldDefn('id', ogr.OFTInteger))
defn = layer.GetLayerDefn()

## If there are multiple geometries, put the "for" loop here

# Create a new feature (attribute and geometry)
feat = ogr.Feature(defn)
feat.SetField('id', 123)

# Make a geometry, from Shapely object
geom = ogr.CreateGeometryFromWkb(poly.wkb)
feat.SetGeometry(geom)

layer.CreateFeature(feat)
feat = geom = None  # destroy these

# Save and close everything
ds = layer = feat = geom = None

---

Update: Although the poster has accepted the GDAL/OGR answer, here is a Fiona equivalent:

from shapely.geometry import mapping, Polygon
from fiona import collection

# Here's an example Shapely geometry
poly = Polygon([(0, 0), (0, 1), (1, 1), (0, 0)])

# Define a polygon feature geometry with one attribute
schema = {
    'geometry': 'Polygon',
    'properties': {'id': 'int'},
}

# Write a new Shapefile
with collection('my_shp2.shp', 'w', 'Esri Shapefile', schema) as c:
    ## If there are multiple geometries, put the "for" loop here
    feat = {}
    feat['geometry'] = mapping(poly)
    feat['properties'] = {'id': 123}
    c.write(feat)

(Note Windows users: you have no excuse)

Answer 2

I've designed Fiona to work well with Shapely. Here is a very simple example of using them together to "clean" shapefile features: https://github.com/Toblerity/Fiona/blob/master/examples/with-shapely.py.