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Shapely CLI

A command line tool which wraps the shapely Python package (which in turn wraps GEOS), providing a convenient way to apply various operations to GeoJSON geometries from the command line.

Note

This is a tool I wrote for personal use and is not affiliated with the Shapely project or endorsed by its maintainers.

Examples

Say you have a GeoJSON file containing a single FeatureCollection, like this one which contains five features representing the five Great Lakes (each feature has some properties and a Polygon geometry).

Here are some things you could use shapely-cli to do.

Print the bounding boxes of each geometry:

$ shapely 'bounds(geom)' < great-lakes.geojson
[-92.11418, 46.42339, -84.35621, 49.02763]
[-88.04342, 41.62791, -84.77450, 46.11519]
[-79.77473, 43.19010, -75.77020, 44.50443]
[-83.46620, 41.39359, -78.86750, 43.10620]
[-84.78083, 43.01730, -79.66258, 46.35539]

Update each feature so that its geometry is guaranteed to be valid:

$ shapely 'geom = make_valid(geom)' < great-lakes.geojson

Add a bbox property to each feature:

$ shapely 'feature["bbox"] = bounds(geom)' < great-lakes.geojson

Produce a single MultiPolygon containing all of the input geometries:

$ shapely 'union_all(geoms)' < great-lakes.geojson

Find and print the feature with the largest area:

$ shapely 'max(features, key=lambda f: geodesic_area(f["geometry"]))' < great-lakes.geojson

Simplify each feature's geometry using Ramer–Douglas–Peucker algorithm:

$ shapely 'geom = simplify(geom, tolerance=0.05)' < great-lakes.geojson

Reproject each feature from WGS 84 Lon/Lat to Web Mercator coordinates:

$ shapely 'geom = transform(geom, proj(4326, 3857))' < great-lakes.geojson

All of the above would also work if the input file were a newline-separated sequence of individual GeoJSON features, like this.

Installation

You can install this tool from PyPI using pip.

pip install shapely-cli

Alternately, you can clone this repository, cd into it, and then run pip install . to install. Check that it worked by running shapely --version in your shell.

How it works

The tool takes one argument which is a Python expression, statement, or series of statements (you can use semicolons to smush multiple statements into one line). It then reads a GeoJSON object or a newline-delimited sequence of GeoJSON objects (it automatically detects the difference) and applies the Python snippet to each feature or geometry in the input.

The Python snippet has access to the following variables:

  • feature is the GeoJSON feature currently being processed
  • geom is the GeoJSON geometry currently being processed (either a bare geometry or the one associated with the current feature)

In addition, everything from Shapely is in scope (via from shapely import *), as well as a few additional helper functions.

The Python snippet may end in an expression, in which case the result of that expression will be printed to STDOUT. Or, the Python snippet may be a statement (or series of statements) which modify feature, geom, or both. In this case each feature or geometry from STDIN is dumped back to STDOUT (with the modifications applied). If you wish to omit a feature from the output, use feature = None or del feature.

If the Python snippet refers to the variables features or geoms (in the plural), then instead of being run for each feature/geometry in the input, it will just be run once. features will be a list of all features in the input, and geoms will be a list of all geoms. This allows for aggregate operations like unioning all the geometries together, or finding the feature with the largest bounding box.

Purpose

I work on geospatial software and do a lot of ad-hoc manipulation of geospatial data. I was finding myself frequently writing short Python scripts to transform GeoJSON data, like the following example:

#!/usr/bin/env python3
"""
Add a bounding box to each feature in the input GeoJSON.
Usage: python add_bbox.py < input.geojson > output.geojson
"""
import sys
import json
import shapely

geojson = json.load(sys.stdin)
assert geojson.get("type") == "FeatureCollection"

for feature in geojson["features"]:
    geom = shapely.geometry.mapping(feature["geometry"])
    feature["bbox"] = shapely.bounds(geom)

json.dump(geojson, file=sys.stdout)

I wrote shapely-cli as an experiment to see if I could replace these single-purpose scripts with one-liners. So far I've found it to be moderately useful.

There are still missing features (for example, if the input is a FeatureCollection, it's not possible to access or modify the properties on that collection). And I'm honestly not sure yet if the approach I've taken (evaling Python snippets) is a good idea or not. Is it too magic? Or just the right amount?

If you decide to try out this tool, I'd love to hear your thoughts on it and how you're using it. Feel free to open an issue or email me.