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I develop an import system that supports popular geoformats. Sometimes I get a DriverError reading GeoPackage files with geopandas, but at times it works well.

My code is simple:

gdf = gpd.read_file(file)

Error:

Traceback (most recent call last): File "fiona/_shim.pyx", line 83, in fiona._shim.gdal_open_vector
File "fiona/_err.pyx", line 291, in fiona._err.exc_wrap_pointer fiona._err.CPLE_AppDefinedError: unable to open database file: this file is a WAL-enabled database. It cannot be opened because it is presumably read-only or in a read-only directory.

During handling of the above exception, another exception occurred:

File "/path/backend/layers/services/load_data.py", line 47, in file_to_geodataframe gdf = gpd.read_file(file)

File "/path/venv1/lib/python3.10/site-packages/geopandas/io/file.py", line 201, in _read_file with reader(path_or_bytes, **kwargs) as features:

File "/path/venv1/lib/python3.10/site-packages/fiona/collection.py", line 555, in init

super(BytesCollection, self).init(self.virtual_file, vsi=filetype, **kwds) File "/path/venv1/lib/python3.10/site-packages/fiona/collection.py", line 162, in init

self.session.start(self, **kwargs)

File "fiona/ogrext.pyx", line 540, in fiona.ogrext.Session.start

File "fiona/_shim.pyx", line 90, in fiona._shim.gdal_open_vector

fiona.errors.DriverError: unable to open database file: this file is a WAL-enabled database. It cannot be opened because it is presumably read-only or in a read-only directory.

What should I do? I'm make tests this with some files that have the same permissions and are placed in the same directory.

Why are some files readable and others not? Am I doing something wrong or is it a file problem?

Filepath:

/homedir/uploads/8371906e-162c-42fc-b56d-5e434ae6878c.gpkg

Update:

I found a solution that works for me. The first argument in the read_file function is the file path or file object.

filename : str, path object or file-like object Either the absolute or relative path to the file or URL to be opened, or any object with a read() method (such as an open file or StringIO)

I used file object and got this error. After I changed the first argument to the path reading worked as I expected.

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2
  • SQLite supports different journal modes and one of those is WAL sqlite.org/wal.html. Read the whole document, it is also explaining the Read-Only databases. If a GeoPackage that is in WAL mode is read-write and it is placed into a media and directory with read-write rights then geopandas should be able to read it.
    – user30184
    May 26, 2022 at 20:38
  • 3
    You can answer your own question : gis.stackexchange.com/help/self-answer
    – J. Monticolo
    May 27, 2022 at 9:02

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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Adding the OP's solution here so this thread is marked as answered:

The first argument in the read_file function is the file path or file object.

filename : str, path object or file-like object Either the absolute or relative path to the file or URL to be opened, or any object with a read() method (such as an open file or StringIO)

I used file object and got this error. After I changed the first argument to the path reading worked as I expected.

Improve this answer
1
  • I had similar issue. I wrote a script using geopandas to open shapefiles(geojson and shp). It was able to read some files and some others not. It gave a similar error in th eoriginal post. By using the full name path it worked/opened on all the files.
    – mapperx
    Jul 19, 2022 at 13:48
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The issue was raised in my case because the path where I wanted to save the gpkg doesn't exist. So creating the dir was enough to make it works

if not os.path.exists(os.path.dirname(destination_path)):
    os.makedirs(os.path.dirname(destination_path))
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