Could not find library geos_c or load any of its variants

Question

I use Python in Fedora 19. I wanted to run the following line:

import shapely.geometry

but the following error appears:

OSError: Could not find library geos_c or load any of its variants ['libgeos_c.so.1', 'libgeos_c.so']

I installed the package Shapely, and the following two libraries:

• glibc-2.17-4.fc19.i686.rpm
• geos-3.3.8-2.fc19.i686.rpm.

What can I do to solve the problem?

Answer 1

Installed shapely using pip, and had the same problem. So I went ahead and installed it like so:

sudo apt-get install libgeos-dev

And it worked. I'm running Ubuntu, so if you're on Fedora, you should run:

sudo yum install geos-devel

On MACOS you can run:

brew install geos

Answer 2

set the LD_LIBRARY_PATH, then run python

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/path_to/geos/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

python mytest.py

Answer 3

In ubuntu, the following commands should take care of it. It all goes down to the following packages.

(Original 2017)

sudo apt-get install libgeos-c1 libgeos-3.4.2

EDIT: (updated versions 2020)

sudo apt-get install libgeos-c1v5 libgeos-3.7.1