Installing geopandas on macOS

A short guide to install geopandas on macOS to process Shape files.

Install Proj and Geos

• https://proj.org
• https://trac.osgeo.org/geos/

brew install proj geos

Install GDAL

Since there are no prebuilt binaries for macOS, we’ll have to build from source.

https://gdal.org/download.html#development-source

git clone https://github.com/OSGeo/GDAL.git
cd GDAL
./configure --with-python
make # Takes a while
make install

Compilation will take a while, so be patient.

Install pip packages

After GDAL completes compiling, cd out of the directory until you’re in the directory containing GDAL in my case it’s ~/Downloads (which is where I cloned the GDAL subdir source)

Now locate the parent directory of the gdal-config binary. It has to be the parent directory otherwise the pip install will fail.

export GDAL_CONFIG=$(\
  find $(pwd) -name gdal-config \
    -exec dirname {} \; \
)

Now install the pip libs:

pip install gdal fiona geopandas