Fiona is OGR's neater API – sleek and elegant on the outside, indomitable power on the inside.

Fiona provides a minimal, uncomplicated Python interface to the open source GIS community's most trusted geodata access library and integrates readily with other Python GIS packages such as pyproj, Rtree, and Shapely.

How minimal? Fiona can read features as mappings from shapefiles or other GIS vector formats and write mappings as features to files using the same formats. That's all. There aren't any feature or geometry classes. Features and their geometries are just data.

Fiona requires Python 2.6+ and libgdal 1.3.2+. To build from a source distribution or repository clone you will need a C compiler and GDAL and Python development headers and libraries. There are no binary distributions or Windows support at this time.

Assuming you will install in a virtual environment and gdal-config is properly installed:

$ virtualenv .
$ source bin/activate
(Fiona)$ pip install -d Fiona Fiona-0.5.tar.gz
(Fiona)$ cd Fiona
(Fiona)$ python setup.py build_ext $(gdal-config --cflags) $(gdal-config --libs) install

If gdal-config is not available or if GDAL/OGR headers and libs aren't installed to a well known location, you must pass the build options and locations in using setup arguments as shown above:

(Fiona)$ python setup.py build_ext -I/path/to/include -L/path/to/lib -lgdal install

Collections are much like file objects. Features are mappings modeled on the GeoJSON format and if you want to do anything fancy with them you will probably need Shapely or something like it:

from fiona import collection
from shapely import asShape, mapping

# Open a source of features
with collection("docs/data/test_uk.shp", "r") as source:

    # Define a schema for the feature sink
    schema = input.schema.copy()
    schema['geometry'] = 'Point'

    # Open a new sink for features
    with collection(
            "test_write.shp", "w", driver="ESRI Shapefile",
            schema=schema, crs=input.crs
            ) as sink:

        # Process only the features intersecting a box
        for f in source.filter(bbox=(-5.0, 55.0, 0.0, 60.0)):

            # Get point on the boundary of the feature
            f['geometry'] = f['geometry'] = {
                'type': 'Point',
                'coordinates': f['geometry']['coordinates'][0][0] }

            # Stage feature for writing
            sink.write(f)

    # The sink shapefile is written to disk when its ``with`` block ends

Building from the source requires Cython. Tests require Nose. From the distribution root:

$ virtualenv .
$ source bin/activate
(Fiona)$ ./cypsrc
(Fiona)$ python setup.py build_ext $(gdal-config --cflags) $(gdal-config --libs) develop
(Fiona)$ python setup.py $(gdal-config --cflags) $(gdal-config --libs) nosetests

Fiona is written by:

• Sean Gillies

With contributions by:

• Frédéric Junod
• Michael Weisman

Fiona would not be possible without the great work of Frank Warmerdam and other GDAL/OGR developers.

Some portions of this work were supported by a grant (for Pleiades) from the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities (http://www.neh.gov).