Adding support to FileGDB driver when fiona/gdal/osgeo were installed through Anaconda

Question

Is there a way to tweak the fiona/gdal/osgeo packages installed through Anaconda so that they can be used to read/write GDB files using the ESRI FileGDB driver?

I have found multiple answers online, but all of them involve re-installing OSGeo or GDAL from the python wheel files. These methods do not work for me because I installed fiona, OSGeo and GDAL using Anaconda. So none the solutions I found online (listed below) seem to work.

I have already downloaded the DLL file from ESRI, placed it in my C:\...\Lib\site-packages\osgeo folder and added a new environment variable called GDAL_DRIVER_PATH indicating the appropriate path. However, contrary to the suggestions in the posts listed below, the __init__.py inside the osgeo folder does not have a commented line that reads os.environ['GDAL_DRIVER_PATH'] = os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), 'gdalplugins'). Therefore, I am not sure where to include this line in my own file system.

Here is a list of related posts/questions/sites with relevant info but which ultimately did not solve my problem.

• How to add support for FileGDB (Esri file gdb API) driver in fiona?
• How to edit file geodatabase in Python using FileGDB Driver?
• Geopandas: Write layer back into GeoDataBase
• Exporting PostGIS Data
• Setting up GDAL/OGR with FileGDB Driver for Python on Windows
• GDAL FileGDB Driver with Anaconda / ArcGIS Pro (Unanswered)
• GDAL Documentation on using ESRI File Geodatabase (FileGDB)
• How to access feature classes in file geodatabases with Python and GDAL?
• ESRI FileGDB API on GitHub

How I installed Fiona and other packages:

I'm currently using Windows 10. After installing Anaconda, I created a new environment called myenv and installed the main libraries I was going to use:

conda create -n myenv pandas geopandas fiona spyder numpy scipy

GDAL was automatically installed as one of the associated/required packages for fiona and geopandas.

In my command prompt, when I activate myenv and type gdalinfo --version, I get the following response:

GDAL 3.0.2, released 2019/10/28

When I use the python-based route, I get the same answer.

import osgeo.gdal
print(osgeo.gdal.__version__)
>3.0.2