importing fiona before shapely raising geos-related OSError

Question

I ran into an issue where the order of imports for fiona and shapely caused the following geos error below which happens when i import fiona before shapely. If I do the reverse all is fine. Must be something screwy on my system. Any tips?

>>> import fiona
>>> from shapely.geometry import shape

OSError: Could not find lib geos_c or load any of its variants ['/Library/Frameworks/GEOS.framework/Versions/Current/GEOS', '/opt/local/lib/libgeos_c.dylib'].

shapely.__version__ == 1.5.13

fiona.__version__ == 1.5.1

platform OSX

Answer 1

There's a problem between ctypes (the Python ffi module) and GEOS shared libs on OS X such that the state of the GEOS lib is corrupted when you load it again via import shapely. It's not a problem on Linux, as far as I can tell.

The Fiona wheels for macosx and Python 2.7, 3.4, and 3.5 on PyPI have statically linked GEOS libraries and won't interfere with Shapely. I recommend using them instead of Anaconda distributions until this bug is fixed.

Answer 2

Platform OS X 10.11 El whatever ,python 2.7.11 ,shapely 1.5.16

I had a similar problem when I import geo-related package inside python.

    from shapely.geometry import shape, MultiPolygon

and I had such a thing

    Failed `CDLL(/usr/local/lib/libgeos_c.dylib)`

I search a lot on Google. But for me, the problem just ends with doing this

    pip install geos 

I just need to manually install geos and that's fine

OS I also do this:

    sudo mkdir opt

to create a folder named opt under / But I am not sure if this helps. Just to let you know if manually installing geos still does not help you.