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Geospatial Data Abstraction Library (GDAL)

GDAL is a library used by many Geographic Information Systems (GIS) packages for converting between many different raster and vector GIS data formats. It also includes command-line utilities for data translation and processing. It is released under an an X/MIT style Open Source license by the Open Source Geospatial Foundation.

Usage

Load by running one of the following

module load libs/gdal/2.2.0/gcc-6.2
module load libs/gdal/3.0.1/gcc-8.2-cmake-3.17.1
module load libs/gdal/3.3.1/gcc-8.2-cmake-3.17.1

This will:

  • add several GDAL programs to your PATH environment variable

  • allow other programs to make use of (dynamically link against) the GDAL library

  • activate the mentioned versions of the GCC/CMake compiler suites (as its C++ standard library is required by GDAL)

You can run gdal-config --version to test that you are running the required version

$ gdal-config --version
2.2.0

The command-line programs that GDAL provides are:

  • gdaladdo

  • gdalbuildvrt

  • gdal-config

  • gdal_contour

  • gdaldem

  • gdalenhance

  • gdal_grid

  • gdalinfo

  • gdallocationinfo

  • gdalmanage

  • gdal_rasterize

  • gdalserver

  • gdalsrsinfo

  • gdaltindex

  • gdaltransform

  • gdal_translate

  • gdalwarp

  • nearblack

  • ogr2ogr

  • ogrinfo

  • ogrlineref

  • ogrtindex

  • testepsg

The gdal... utilities are mostly for processing raster GIS data formats, whilst the ogr... utilities are for processing vector GIS data formats.

Documentation

Standard man pages are available for the provided commands/functions.

These can be viewed using e.g.

$ man gdal_contour

Much more information is available on the project site.

Supported file formats

GDAL has been compiled on this system with support for only a limited set of GIS data formats. See Installation notes below for a list of those provided by each available version of GDAL.

Installation notes

This section is primarily for administrators of the system.

Version 3.3.1

GDAL 3.3.1 was compiled with v8.2.0 of the GCC compiler suite. This was installed using the install_gdal.sh script. This script will automatically install GDAL, generate the module file and correct the file permissions as needed. Build logs are also automatically generated and copied to the base install directory or src directory.

The additional GPKG and SQlite drivers are added via the loading of the SQLite module and manual specification of the SQLite root directory for the ./configure step.

The file formats and drivers supported by this build are listed in the compilation log files which can be found in the module top level directory. e.g. gdal-install.o1234567

Version 3.0.1

GDAL 3.0.1 was compiled with v8.2.0 of the GCC compiler suite. This was installed using the install_gdal.sh script. This script will automatically install GDAL, generate the module file and correct the file permissions as needed. Build logs are also automatically generated and copied to the base install directory or src directory.

The additional GPKG and SQlite drivers are added via the loading of the SQLite module and manual specification of the SQLite root directory for the ./configure step.

The file formats and drivers supported by this build are listed in the compilation log files which can be found in the module top level directory. e.g. gdal-install.o1234567

Version 2.2.0

GDAL 2.2.0 was compiled with v4.9.4 of the GCC compiler suite.

  1. Download, configure, build and install by switching to a scratch directory and running this script, ensuring that all stderr and stdout is redirected to a log file.

  2. Install this modulefile as /usr/local/modulefiles/libs/gdal/2.2.0/gcc-4.9.4

The file formats supported by this build are listed in the compilation log files which can be found in the module top level directory.