Common installation problems

Installing the easy way

It's easiest to install your platform's package for lxml globally, if it has one. For example, on ubuntu:

$ sudo apt‑get install python‑lxml

(Note that if you want to take this approach, you must not run virtualenv with the —no‑site‑packages option, as that will prevent your virtualenv from being able to use this package.)

The slightly harder way

If your platform doesn't have a ready made lxml package, or if you prefer to build your own, you'll need the libxml2 and libxslt development libraries, and then install lxml yourself. For example, on ubuntu you can do:

$ sudo apt‑get install libxml2 libxml2‑dev libxslt libxslt‑dev

And once you have those, on any platform you can do:

$ sudo ldconfig
$ sudo pip install lxml

Installing the easy way

GDAL installation isn't covered in detail by the GeoDjango install docs.

The easiest thing to do is check if your operating system already provides a ready made python GDAL package. For example, on Ubuntu, this will work:

$ sudo apt‑get install python‑gdal

(Note that if you want to take this approach, you must not run virtualenv with the —no‑site‑packages option, as that will prevent your virtualenv from being able to use this package.)

GDAL the hard way

Installing GDAL by hand can be a little tricky, because you have to be careful about which version you install, and in some cases it may not install properly without a few extra arguments.

First, get the GDAL development library. On Ubuntu, this can be installed like:

$ sudo apt‑get install libgdal libdal1‑dev
$ sudo ldconfig

Next, make sure you are in your openblock environment and it is activated:

$ cd <path_to_openblock>
$ source bin/activate

Next, determine which version of the Python GDAL package you need. Try this command:

$ gdal‑config —version

The output will be a version number like "1.6.3". Your Python GDAL package version number needs to match the first two digits. So if gdal‑config —version tells you "1.6.3", then you would need a version of Python GDAL that's at least 1.6.0, but less than 1.7. Or if gdal config tells you that you have 1.7.0, then you would need version 1.7.something of the Python GDAL package. You get the idea. You can use pip to find an appropriate version, like this:

$ pip install —no‑install "GDAL>=1.6,<1.7a"  # adjust version as needed

Next, remove the bogus setup.cfg file, if any:

$ rm ‑f $VIRTUAL_ENV/build/GDAL/setup.cfg

Build the python package with some extra options, determined as described below:

$ cd $VIRTUAL_ENV/build/GDAL
$ python setup.py build_ext —gdal‑config=gdal‑config \
    —library‑dirs=/usr/lib \
    libraries=gdal1.6.0 \
    —include‑dirs=/usr/include/gdal \
  install

The correct value for library dirs can be determined by running gdal‑config —libs and looking for any output starting with ‑L. The correct value for libraries can be determined with the same command but looking for output beginning with ‑l. The correct value for —include‑dirs can be determined by running gdal‑config —cflags and looking for output beginning with ‑I.

Still no luck?

If you get an error like /usr/include/gdal/ogr_p.h:94: fatal error: swq.h: No such file or directory, that's because of a bug in GDAL. (See .)

The workaround is to manually install swq.h in the same directory that contains ogr_p.h, typically somewhere like /usr/include/gdal. You can get swq.h for GDAL 1.7 here:

Then try the preceding setup.py build_ext command again.