Installing Fiona in Debian7.x-64bits/Python2.7

Question

I need to install Fiona in my Debian7.x-64bits/Python2.7 machine. I already installed GDAL/OGR, pip, virtualenv, and six. I am using Python 2.7 so argparse is also installed. The installation protocol provided at the Fiona website is not completely clear to me:

$ mkdir fiona_env
$ virtualenv fiona_env
$ source fiona_env/bin/activate
(fiona_env)$ pip install Fiona

(Source: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/Fiona )

I followed the steps from both a non-root- and a root-terminal. In the first case some problems related with permissions arose. In the second the errors were related with an inability to find OGR directories.

I am running the installing protocol from my home directory, e.g. me@mymachine:~($ or #). I am not sure if that is the problem. I already checked around for documentation in the Internet, but it seems that the installation protocol from Toblerity (referenced above) is the most explicit.

Answer 1

I'm not on Debian but I can give you the principles.

Look at Fiona. To build from a source distribution you will need a C compiler and the GDAL headers and libraries, so you need to install first GDAL/OGR.

After in the Fiona folder:

• build the .so files

python setup.py build_ext -I/path/to/gdal/include -L/path/to/gdal/lib -lgdal build

• build the module:

python setup.py build

• install the module:

python setup.py install

or in one line:

python setup.py build_ext -I/path/to/gdal/include -L/path/to/gdal/lib -lgdal install

You can also us gdal-config to find the libraries and headers:

gdal_config --libs: gives you The libraries and link directives required to use GDAL
= -L/path/to/gdal/lib
gdal_config --cflags: gives you the include and macro definition required to compiled modules using GDAL. 
= -I/path/to/gdal/include

You can also write the libraries options in the setup.cfg file

Answer 2

For reference: Note that there is a fiona package in debian gis (waiting in the new queue) and on ubuntugis unstable (you can install packages python-fiona and python3-fiona).

For building from source you will need Cython (recent version 0.21) and libgdal-dev. You can actually check the full build dependencies in the package mentioned above.