A gdal wheel file can be obtained from Christoph Gohlke’s website. Often when pip is used for install it downloads a wheel file for the install. Wheel files contain all the information needed to install a python package.

With pip we can use a wheel file to install a package. The upside is that because it is open-source anyone can develop a solution, and I’ll explain one now. GDAL is an open-source project, and depending on the user group and other applications there may not be resources to provide a python-specific distribution or other considerations that prevent it. That means it relies on underlying C++ code and the package must be built/compiled in a certain manner to be usable with Python. GDAL is actually a C++ library with python bindings. Anaconda users can also follow this tutorial but the conda method is recommended.įirst, let’s understand why the problem occurs. If you want to install gdal to a conda (Anaconda) environment you can follow my tutorial for installing gdal with conda. You can also check out my full GDAL for Python course to get step-by-step explanations complete with code and datasets for performing raster analysis with GDAL. Once you get GDAL installed, check out our tutorial to get started using GDAL with Python. You can also check out the video at the end of this article for a demonstration. You can still install gdal with pip, and here’s how to do it. However, you will receive a message that pip failed to build the python wheel file, then a long, verbose error message. If you try to install GDAL to a python environment with a command like python -m pip install gdal it will initially seem like the installation is going to happen. Installing GDAL for Python with pip, the package installation package, is not as easy as it may seem.

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