Clean way to install gdaltools plugin for QGIS on OSX

Question

I have qgis 1.8.0 on osx mountain lion and am installing the gdaltools 1.2.29. I have run into a problem that a number of people are seeing. The plugin cannot find my gdal python (see below).

Anyway, I can fix the problem hackily (if that is a word) by symlinking

  cd /Library/Python/2.7
  sudo mv site-packages/ site-packages-old
  sudo ln -s /Library/Frameworks/GDAL.framework/Versions/1.9/Python/2.7/site-packages /Library/Python/2.7

So that fixes the prob because the python path list that the plugin knows about includes /Library/Python/2.7/site-packages But the real solution is to add a path to the list of paths that the python plugin[s] know about. How do you do that?

----start of error message----

Couldn't load plugin GdalTools due an error when calling its classFactory() method

Traceback (most recent call last): File "/Applications/QGIS.app/Contents/MacOS/../Resources/python/qgis/utils.py", line 164, in startPlugin plugins[packageName] = package.classFactory(iface) File "/Users/aberezin/.qgis//python/plugins/GdalTools/init.py", line 32, in classFactory from GdalTools import GdalTools File "/Applications/QGIS.app/Contents/MacOS/../Resources/python/qgis/utils.py", line 309, in _import mod = _builtin_import(name, globals, locals, fromlist, level) File "/Users/aberezin/.qgis//python/plugins/GdalTools/GdalTools.py", line 39, in raise ImportError( error_str ) ImportError: No module named osgeo [python-gdal]

Python version: 2.7.2 (default, Jun 20 2012, 16:23:33) [GCC 4.2.1 Compatible Apple Clang 4.0 (tags/Apple/clang-418.0.60)]

QGIS version: 1.8.0-Lisboa Lisboa,

Python path: ['/Applications/QGIS.app/Contents/MacOS/../Resources/python', '/Users/aberezin/.qgis//python', '/Users/aberezin/.qgis//python/plugins', '/Applications/QGIS.app/Contents/MacOS/../Resources/python/plugins', '/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python27.zip', '/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7', '/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/plat-darwin', '/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/plat-mac', '/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/plat-mac/lib-scriptpackages', '/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/Extras/lib/python', '/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/lib-tk', '/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/lib-old', '/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/lib-dynload', '/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/Extras/lib/python/PyObjC']

Answer 1

Alan,

The path to gdal's Python bindings is missing because Apple seems to remove anything in the system site-packages folder during upgrade to Mt. Lion (thank-you-very-much Apple).

There is a thread in the QGIS User mailing list about this, and gdal in particular. You basically have to reinstall all previously installed Python packages, or possibly copy them over from a pre-Mt. Lion upgrade backup.

However, first you must undo what you did when creating your symbolic link to the gdal framework subdirectory: remove the link and rename site-packages-old back to site-packages. You definitely do not want to rename the site-packages folder of your Python installation, or point it to a specific library's install.

After you have your gdal/osgeo Python support reinstalled, GdalTools, which is a separate core plugin that is part of QGIS, as Giovanni noted, should work fine.

Answer 2

Here is how I got this working on my machine :

Here is the context:

You are running a Mac with Mountain Lion You need to install GDAL with its python bindings

Pre-Requisites:

I use the MacPorts package managers for mac, and PythonBrew for managing my python installation and virtual environment management, and based on my experiences, I urge you to do the same :)

Install mac ports and pythonbrew

Using pythonbrew, install the python version > 3.2 for the latest python GDAL bindings to work (yup, you heard it right. you need python > 3.2 for you to use the python bindings). ‘switch’ to that version of python.

using macports, install gdal, by doing : port install gdal

Setup a virtual environment using pythonbrew (see the the "usage" section of the pythonbrew home page above), and switch to that virtual env.

Download the gdal package by doing : pip install —no-install GDAL This will error out : don’t worry, we did this to grab the source.

cd ~/.pythonbrew/venvs/PYTHON_VERSION/VIRTUALENV_NAME/build/GDAL

Edit setup.cfg, and change gdal_conf to point to /opt/local/bin/gdal-config (note that this does not have a ‘_’, but a hyphen)

From the same directory, do a : python setup.py build_ext —include-dirs=/opt/local/include/

This should compile without any errors (some warnings, but no actual errors)

We aren’t done yet : to complete installation, do a ‘pip install —no-download GDAL’

To test your installation, from the python interpreter, do a : ‘from osgeo import gdal’ and check that no errors show up.

Hope that helps!