Vjylku

I am developing some code in Python, and I want to use the GDAL/OGR python bindings. What is the minimum I need to install in order to use the GDAL and OGR python bindings?

What is the easiest way to install GDAL/OGR if I only want to use it from Python?

I'm looking for an answer that applies to both mac and windows.

GDAL is listed in the Python Package Index (PyPi) but I don't understand how to install its dependencies (libgdal and the header files for both libgdal and numpy). Maybe all I need to do is install numpy and then get libgdal somewhere, and if so, where? Does a windows install need the Windows Binaries in addition to libgdal and it's header files?

How can I ensure that I get the proper python bindings for my version of Python (2.5, 2.6, 2.7, 3)?

Must changes be made to the PATH environment variable in order to use GDAL and OGR from Python, or can everything be accessed through my site-packages folder and a typical import statement?

These questions are relevant to this question but do not answer it:
installing GEOS, PROJ, GDAL/OGR into a python virtualenv on Mac OS X
How to install GDAL with Python on windows?

I should note that FWTools, OSGeo4W, and kyngchaos offer ogr and gdal with python bindings and are excellent, but FWTools and OSGeo4W ship with their own python, rather than acting as libraries for an existing python installation, and the kyng chaos frameworks appear to be for OS X only.

Only adding this because I tried using the kyng chaos tools, but on my Mac OS X machine I was able to very, very easily install this with Anaconda

conda install gdal

Posting in case anyone finds this again - I realize the original post is 3 years old.

There are several tutorials on this site, including a way to get your environment set up. I use pyscripter over crimson editor, but either should work.

First if you are on windows,then there are straight away installers,on the link told my friends above.But if you are on Linux this is the way for installing libgdal 1.11.

go to this page

http://packages.ubuntu.com/trusty/libgdal1h

download the required .deb file choosing your system architecture.

after downloading it go to downloaded directory and run this command

$ sudo dpkg -i libgdal1h_1.10.1+dfsg-5ubuntu1_amd64.deb 

Now you will get an error telling dependencies are not installed.
now type this command

$ sudo apt-get -f install

It installs all the dependencies automatically
now re run the main installation command.

$ sudo dpkg -i libgdal1h_1.10.1+dfsg-5ubuntu1_amd64.deb 

It will now install happily.Now we need to install developer libraries for gdal.

$ sudo apt-get install libgdal1-dev 



export CPLUS_INCLUDE_PATH=/usr/include/gdal



export C_INCLUDE_PATH=/usr/include/gdal

Next if you have numpy,you can proceed to GDAL python library installation,else install numpy,for installing numpy and scipy on linux use

$ sudo apt-get install python-numpy python-scipy

now using pip install GDAL library

$ sudo pip install GDAL

I'm not aware of an easy way to install it on OS X, I think Kyng Chaos is the best thing going, as is OSGEO4W on the Windows front. The Python bindings are just wrappers to the actual C/C++ code, you can't get away without installing them either from source or through binaries.

Pip or easy_install can do the trick, depending on the Python version and system libraries present; for example here's the PyPI directory for Python 2.5. Getting GDAL installed consistently across multiple platforms and multiple versions of Python remains non-trivial, but in many ways that makes sense: its perhaps the one library which underlies most open source and many proprietary GIS software, and has a large number of data format dependencies below it.

I had this exact problem when installing GDAL/OGR alongside the ArcGIS python install. My solution for windows was:

1. Download binaries of gdal and python bindings from http://www.gisinternals.com/sdk/. This includes versions of the python bindings for different versions of python.


2. Update the paths in the python file manually:

os.environ['PATH'] = "C:/Program Files (x86)/GDAL/;" + os.environ['PATH']

oldpaths = sys.path

sys.path = ["C:/Program Files (x86)/GDAL/python/",]

sys.path.extend(oldpaths)

from osgeo import ogr

from osgeo import osr

from gdalconst import *

from osgeo import gdal

This isn't very pretty but allows you to mix different installations. You also know explicitly what you are loading.

Edit: fixed syntax error

Use this if you don't care ppa addition,

$ sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ubuntugis/ubuntugis-unstable

$ sudo apt-get update

$ sudo apt-get install python-gdal

2019-04-19: Adding on a ubuntu solution that worked out for me on a cloud ubuntu server, from https://stackoverflow.com/a/41613466/4355695

sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:ubuntugis/ppa

sudo apt update 

sudo apt install gdal-bin python-gdal python3-gdal

I'm not the original poster of this answer but this question is locked so have to edit an existing one. This source (ppa:ubuntugis/ppa) is probably less "unstable" than the previous one suggested, and worked out fine for a python2 program I was trying to get to run on my server.