Installation

Installation from PyPI

PyGEOS is available as a binary distribution (wheel) for Linux, OSX and Windows platforms. The distribution includes a GEOS version that was most recent at the time of the PyGEOS release. Install the binary wheel with pip as follows:

$ pip install pygeos

Installation using Anaconda

PyGEOS is available on the conda-forge channel. Install as follows:

$ conda install pygeos --channel conda-forge

Installation with custom GEOS libary

You may want to use a specific GEOS version or a GEOS distribution that is already present on your system. In such cases you will need to compile PyGEOS yourself.

On Linux:

$ sudo apt install libgeos-dev  # skip this if you already have GEOS
$ pip install pygeos --no-binary

On OSX:

$ brew install geos  # skip this if you already have GEOS
$ pip install pygeos --no-binary

We do not have a recipe for Windows platforms. The following steps should enable you to build PyGEOS yourself:

Installation from source

The same as installation with a custom GEOS binary, but then instead of installing pygeos with pip, you clone the package from Github:

$ git clone git@github.com:pygeos/pygeos.git

Install it in development mode using pip:

$ pip install -e .[test]

Testing PyGEOS

PyGEOS can be tested using pytest:

$ pip install pytest  # or pygeos[test]
$ pytest --pyargs pygeos.tests

GEOS discovery (compile time)

If GEOS is installed on Linux or OSX, normally the geos-config command line utility will be available and pip will find GEOS automatically. If the correct geos-config is not on the PATH, you can add it as follows (on Linux/OSX):

$ export PATH=/path/to/geos/bin:$PATH

Alternatively, you can specify where PyGEOS should look for GEOS (on Linux/OSX):

$ export GEOS_INCLUDE_PATH=/path/to/geos/include
$ export GEOS_LIBRARY_PATH=/path/to/geos/lib

On Windows, there is no geos-config and the include and lib folders need to be specified manually in any case:

$ set GEOS_INCLUDE_PATH=C:\path\to\geos\include
$ set GEOS_LIBRARY_PATH=C:\path\to\geos\lib

Common locations of GEOS (to be suffixed by lib, include or bin):

  • Anaconda (Linux/OSX): $CONDA_PREFIX/Library

  • Anaconda (Windows): %CONDA_PREFIX%\Library

  • OSGeo4W (Windows): C:\OSGeo4W64

GEOS discovery (runtime)

PyGEOS is dynamically linked to GEOS. This means that the same GEOS library that was used during PyGEOS compilation is required on your system at runtime. When using pygeos that was distributed as a binary wheel or through conda, this is automatically the case and you can stop reading.

In other cases this can be tricky, especially if you have multiple GEOS installations next to each other. We only include some guidelines here to address this issue as this document is not intended as a general guide of shared library discovery.

If you encounter exceptions like:

ImportError: libgeos_c.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

You will have to make the shared library file available to the Python interpreter. There are in general four ways of making Python aware of the location of shared library:

  1. Copy the shared libraries into the pygeos module directory (this is how Windows binary wheels work: they are distributed with the correct dlls in the pygeos module directory)

  2. Copy the shared libraries into the library directory of the Python interpreter (this is how Anaconda environments work)

  3. Copy the shared libraries into some system location (C:\Windows\System32; /usr/local/lib, this happens if you installed GEOS through apt or brew)

  4. Add the shared library location to a the dynamic linker path variable at runtime. (Advanced usage; Linux and OSX only; on Windows this method was deprecated in Python 3.8)

The filenames of the GEOS shared libraries are:

  • On Linux: libgeos-*.so.*, libgeos_c-*.so.*

  • On OSX: libgeos.dylib, libgeos_c.dylib

  • On Windows: geos-*.dll, geos_c-*.dll

Note that pygeos does not make use of any RUNPATH (RPATH) header. The location of the GEOS shared library is not stored inside the compiled PyGEOS library.