installing GEOS, PROJ, GDAL/OGR into python virtualenv on Mac OS X

Question

I am trying to setup an isolated python virtualenv to work on GIS projects on my Mac OS X. Sounds like I will need to install the GEOS, PROJ, GDAL/OGR from the kyngchaos site here http://www.kyngchaos.com/software/frameworks and not easy_install it into my virtualenv.

The downloads available on kyngchaos are pkg installers and not just an egg or bdist of python modules. So, I am not very sure as to what else the installer is doing to the environment other than just copying files to /Library/Framework/geos.framework folder.

How would I go about installing a specific version of GEOS, PROJ, GDAL/OGR into my new python virtualenv?

Answer 1

If you need to use OSX you can easily avoid installation complexities by installing homebrew!

After this the only commands you will need to enter are:

brew install gdal

It will automatically install also proj and geos because they are gdal dependencies.

Answer 2

If each Framework of Kyngchaos is in the PATH, it is easy. Every framework has a Unix folder, with the libraries for compiling things like pyproj or geos python wherever you want, even in a private Python environment (I've never had a problem)

The only problem is that Gdal python is in the Gdal Framework. But in site-packages there a file gdal.pth

gdal.pth file:

import sys; sys.path.insert(0,'/Library/Frameworks/GDAL.framework/Versions/1.7/Python/site-packages')

if you do not want to compile it yourself, copy this file in your isolated python virtualenv

Answer 3

I make replicable Python/C/C++ GIS environments using virtualenv and zc.buildout. My ichpage https://github.com/sgillies/ichpage project is a little dated but could serve as a template for an up-to-date one (like the one I use for my Pleiades site development work and deployments). Blog post about it at http://sgillies.net/blog/856/i-can-has-python-and-gis-environments/.

Answer 4

Virtualenv allows you to provision a private Python environment, but does not extend to system libraries outside of the Python universe. The three packages you mentioned are all C/C++ applications at their core, so while they have interfaces for use with Python, they cannot be packaged without interacting with the C libraries (libc on up).

Because of the difficulty installing those packages from scratch, particularly on OS X, you may want to think about running a sandboxed virtual machine using something like VirtualBox and install the packages through apt on that sandboxed machine: while it is possible to do the same on OS X, it probably isn't worth the effort.

Answer 5

I found a good blog post that provides another solution that worked in my case:

http://linfiniti.com/2013/02/installing-python-gdal-into-a-python-virtualenv-in-osx/

The only difference to the blog post is that I had to do is to download the correct version of GDAL that matched the kyngchaos packages. In my case I was using the GDAL framework version 1.10, so the following install was successful

source venv/bin/activate
pip install --no-install GDAL==1.10.0
cd venv/build/GDAL
python setup.py build_ext\
    --gdal-config=/Library/Frameworks/GDAL.framework/Versions/1.10/unix/bin/gdal-config\
    --library-dirs=/Library/Frameworks/GDAL.framework/Versions/1.10/unix/lib/\
    --include-dirs=/Library/Frameworks/GDAL.framework/Versions/1.10/Headers/

Then leave the GDAL directory and install without download

cd ~
pip install --no-download GDAL

UPDATE: You might have to add some env vars before calling setup.py for the compilation step to work (see this question)

export CFLAGS=-Qunused-arguments export CPPFLAGS=-Qunused-arguments

Answer 6

Yellowcap's answer above worked for me with some minor tweaks:

pip install --no-install is no longer an option. Instead, inside the env directory:

pip download GDAL==1.11.2 (or whichever version you want)

Unzip the downloaded directory and cd into it:

tar -zxvf GDAL-1.11.2.tar.gz
cd GDAL-1.11.2

pip install --no-download is also no longer an option. Instead stay in the GDAL directory and run:

python setup.py build
python setup.py install

Answer 7

NextGIS installer have isolated gdal, geos, proj, etc. and python bindings (Python 2.7) to gdal. Installation not affected on system libraries (only several environment variables in bash_profile).

Answer 8

After 9 years, it's still an issue to install GDAL and co. As said, if you don't go with conda but brew, you cannot access GDAL from the virtualenv. You then have 3 options:

1. Create a virtualenv with the flag --system-site-packages,
2. Use pygdal,
3. Link the recipe from brew.

Here is how to do it:

brew tap osgeo/osgeo4mac
brew install osgeo-gdal
brew install osgeo-gdal-python

# link gdal
brew link osgeo-gdal --force
brew link osgeo-gdal-python --force

# create venv
python3 -m venv venv && . venv/bin/activate && pip install --upgrade pip setuptools 

# install gdal
pip install gdal

Careful, about your PATH. You may have GDAL with a Postgres installation, and this will conflict.