Having trouble installing rgdal and gdal on Centos

Question

I had a hell of a time getting gdal installed today, even though I've been able to do it successfully in the past. I finally got it working, so if you're reading this I hope I can save you some time.

If you are running into issues like:

error while loading shared libraries: libgdal.so.20: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

or

ogr_sfcgal.h:34:34: fatal error: SFCGAL/capi/sfcgal_c.h: No such file or directory

or you're stuck on the yum rpm of gdal that's at 1.11, then I hope the answer below helps you.

Answer 1

First of all, make sure you have the dependencies installed, like SFCGAL:

sudo yum install SFCGAL -y

You might come across others with errors similar to the one above for SFCGAL. I'll leave it up to you to track them down and install them via yum.

A recent RPM of gdal isn't available via yum, so you will have to install from source. What often happens with installing gdal, it seems to me, is that a user will install to /usr/local/bin rather than /usr/bin, which is where rgdal seems to look. This means you need to install to /usr/bin. But how can you do this without an RPM? You will install from source.

It's simple. Download a >2.0 version of gdal here: https://trac.osgeo.org/gdal/wiki/DownloadSource

And run the following:

./configure --prefix=/usr
make
sudo make install

After this, you might get an error like

error while loading shared libraries: libgdal.so.20: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

You need to updated your shared library links. You can do this with:

sudo ldconfig

I hope this is helpful and that I saved you some time. I'm not an expert, so this might not be perfect advice. I wish you luck.

Answer 2

I found that the yum installation of SFCGAL was always missing the header file.

Instead I removed SFCGAL then executed the gdal build/install steps.

sudo yum erase SFCGAL

After gdal was built and installed, I reinstalled SFCGAL

sudo yum install SFCGAL