Setting up a development environment

Build requirements

Vagrant

Vagrant is a tool that works with a virtualization product such as VirtualBox to create a reproducible development environment. GDAL includes a Vagrant configuration file that sets up an Ubuntu virtual machine with a comprehensive set of dependencies.

Once Vagrant has been installed and the GDAL source downloaded, the virtual machine can be set up by running the following from the source root directory:

# VAGRANT_VM_CPU=number_of_cpus
vagrant up

The source root directory is exposed inside the virtual machine at /vagrant, so changes made to GDAL source files on the host are seen inside the VM. To rebuild GDAL after changing source files, you can connect to the VM and re-run the build command:

vagrant ssh
cmake --build .

Note that the following directories on the host will be created (and can be removed if the Vagrant environment is no longer needed):

../apt-cache/ubuntu/jammy64: contains a cache of Ubuntu packages of the VM, to allow faster VM reconstruction
build_vagrant: CMake build directory
ccache_vagrant: CCache directory

Docker

The Linux environments used for building and testing GDAL on GitHub Actions are defined by Docker images that can be pulled to any machine for development. The Docker image used for each build is specified in linux_build.yml. As an example, the following commands can be run from the GDAL source root to build and test GDAL using the clang address sanitizer (ASAN) in the same environment that is used in GitHub Actions:

docker run -it \
    -v $(pwd):/gdal:rw \
    ghcr.io/osgeo/gdal-deps:ubuntu20.04-master
cd /gdal
mkdir build-asan
cd build-asan
../.github/workflows/asan/build.sh
../.github/workflows/asan/test.sh

To avoid built objects being owned by root, it may be desirable to add -u $(id -u):$(id -g) -v /etc/passwd:/etc/passwd to the docker run command above.

Building on Windows with Conda dependencies and Visual Studio

This approach is less appropriate for Debug builds of GDAL, than other methods, such as using vcpkg.

A minimal Windows build configuration utilizing Conda is provided within the GitHub Actions workflow defined in :source_file:.github/workflows/cmake_builds.yml - see the build-windows-conda job.

Install git

Install git

Install miniconda

Install miniconda

Install Visual Studio

Install Visual Studio In Visual Studio Installer Workloads tab check Desktop development with C++. Only the latest Community Edition (2022) is available.

Install GDAL dependencies

Start a Conda-enabled PowerShell console and assuming there is a c:\\dev directory

cd c:\dev
conda create --yes --name gdal
conda activate gdal
conda install --yes --quiet -c conda-forge compilers cmake curl libiconv icu python swig numpy `
    pytest pytest-env pytest-benchmark filelock zlib lxml jsonschema setuptools
# --only-deps only installs the dependencies of the listed packages, not the packages themselves
conda install --yes --quiet -c conda-forge --only-deps `
    libgdal libgdal-hdf4 libgdal-hdf5 libgdal-netcdf libgdal-pdf libgdal-jp2openjpeg

Note

The compilers package will install vs2022_win-64 (at time of writing) to set the appropriate environment for CMake to pick up. It also finds and works with Visual Studio 2022 (Professional or Enterprise) if that is installed.

Checkout GDAL sources

cd c:\dev
git clone https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal.git

Build GDAL

From a Conda-enabled PowerShell console:

conda activate gdal
cd c:\dev\gdal
cmake -S . -B build -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH:FILEPATH="$env:CONDA_PREFIX"
cmake --build build --config Release -j 8

Run GDAL tests

Check everything has built correctly, and then run the test suite using the commands below from a Conda-enabled PowerShell console:

cd c:\dev\gdal\build
# set environment variables, see section below
..\scripts\setdevenv.ps1
# check the version
gdal --version
# check the Python module and version
python -c "import osgeo; import inspect; print(inspect.getfile(osgeo))"
python -c "from osgeo import gdal; print(gdal.__version__)"
# run the test suite
ctest -V --build-config Release

Setting development environment variables

Once GDAL has been built, a number of environment variables must be set to be able to execute C++ or Python utilities of the build directory, or run tests.

This can be done by sourcing the following from the build directory:

. ../scripts/setdevenv.sh

(with adjustments to the above path if the build directory is not a subdirectory of the GDAL source root).

For Windows, a similar scripts/setdevenv.bat script exists (it currently assumes a Release build).

cd c:\dev\gdal\build
..\scripts\setdevenv.bat

Alternatively, on Windows, you can set up a PowerShell development environment using the scripts/setdevenv.ps1 script:

cd c:\dev\gdal\build
..\scripts\setdevenv.ps1

To verify that environment variables have been set correctly, you can check the version of a GDAL binary:

gdalinfo --version
# GDAL 3.13.0dev-8c3cf3de02, released 2025/11/14

and the Python bindings:

python3 -c 'from osgeo import gdal; print(gdal.__version__)'
# 3.11.0dev-c4a2e0b926-dirty