GDAL Python Utilities

The GDAL python utilities are included with GDAL. If you’ve installed GDAL you already have them. However you may want to use a newer or older version of the utilities without changing GDAL. This is where gdal-utils comes in.

gdal-utils: is the GDAL Python Utilities distribution. This is what you install. Its home page is https://pypi.org/project/gdal-utils/ . Install with pip install gdal-utils.

osgeo_utils: is the python package. This is what you use in your code after installing, e.g. from osgeo_utils import .... If you’re not writing code, ignore it.

Commonly used utilities include:

• gdal_merge

• gdal_edit

• gdal_calc

• ogrmerge

For the full list see Programs and note the ones that end in .py.

Developers

Read the gdal-utils project charter.

Clone or download the gdal project: https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/

In your IDE set gdal-utils as the root folder, …/swig/python/gdal-utils.

./osgeo_utils - contains the Programs (those scripts that have launch wrappers created by pip and added to PYTHONHOME/Scripts)

./osgeo_utils/samples - working python scripts but not typically available in path (run them with python3 path/to/samples/something.py)

Improve the docs by editing the RST pages in …/doc/source which generate the web pages:

• https://gdal.org/api/index.html#python-api

• https://gdal.org/programs/index.html#programs

• https://gdal.org/api/python_samples.html

Contribute changes with Pull Requests from your fork to main GDAL project and use gdal-utils label.