Having trouble with gdal on Anaconda? Try this!

If you are interested in this article I assume you recently tried to use gdal with anaconda for one project or another and have run into a problem. So the quick solution for your problem is...

Create a new virtual environment and install gdal in that environment!!

After encountering countless problems with python with different projects, the golden rule I've learned is: always create a virtual environment for your project!

If you are still reading this it means you would like a detailed explanation (or maybe for some reason you like me rambling about gdal of all things!).

So one of my friends was working on a data science project and was running into a lot of issues and asked me to take a look at his project to see if I could get it to run.

The error he was encountering was: DLL load failed: The specified procedure could not be found

So the solution here is to create a new virtual environment in anaconda using conda in the terminal (if on windows you can use the anaconda-prompt terminal). Open the folder where you want to create the project and then follow these steps:

First update conda if necessary using:

conda update conda

Then we can proceed to creating a virtualenv (short for virtual environment) using:

conda create -n yourenvname

Now activate your virtualenv using:

conda activate yourenvname

Now just execute the following statement and it will install all dependencies as well as make any changes required

conda install gdal

I was using jupyter notebooks so I will open that (this should work fine with spyder as well):

anaconda-navigator

Open jupyter-notebook (the virtualenv will be selected by default)

In the first cell execute

from osgeo import gdal

The cell will execute without errors!

Cheers!!!

Gif via Giphy