Django, GDAL and CircleCI 2

Question

I have a Django app configured with GeoDjango that is failing on CircleCI 2.0 builds with the following error:

django.core.exceptions.ImproperlyConfigured: Could not find the GDAL library. Is GDAL installed? If it is, try setting GDAL_LIBRARY_PATH in your settings.

However, when I remove 'django.contrib.gis' from DJANGO_APPS in settings.py the build runs successfully.

Are there additional steps for configuring GDAL in CircleCI outside of the postgres and GDAL docker images? I (perhaps incorrectly) assumed that GDAL would be found after the docker image was installed. Below is my config.yml:

version: 2
jobs:
  build:
    docker:
      - image: circleci/python:3.6.3

      - image: circleci/postgres:10.1-postgis
        environment:
        - POSTGRES_USER=ubuntu
        - POSTGRES_DB=myapp_test

      - image: geodata/gdal

    working_directory: ~/repo

    steps:
      - checkout

      # Download and cache dependencies
      - restore_cache:
          keys:
          - v1-dependencies-{{ checksum "requirements.txt" }}
          # fallback to using the latest cache if no exact match is found
          - v1-dependencies-

      - run:
          name: install dependencies
          command: |
            python3 -m venv venv
            . venv/bin/activate
            pip install -r requirements.txt
      - save_cache:
          paths:
            - ./venv
          key: v1-dependencies-{{ checksum "requirements.txt" }}

      - run:
          name: run tests
          command: |
            . venv/bin/activate
            python manage.py test
          environment:
            DATABASE_URL: "postgres://ubuntu@localhost:5432/myapp_test"

      - store_artifacts:
          path: test-reports
          destination: test-reports

Answer 1

I fixed it by adding the following:

apt-get update && apt-get install -y \
gdal-bin python-gdal python3-gdal

right where you run pip install:

  - run:
      name: install dependencies
      command: |
        python3 -m venv venv
        . venv/bin/activate
        pip install -r requirements.txt
        apt-get update && apt-get install -y \
        gdal-bin python-gdal python3-gdal

Answer 2

I am not familiar with Docker, but I've had my fair share of issues installing GDAL. Typically, when I have had to setup an environment which required GDAL in Django, I've followed the following steps (roughly).

First I run these commands, to install the GDAL library and set up the headers before installing the python library:

sudo apt-get install libgdal-dev
gdal-config --version  # to see what version of GDAL you have
export CPLUS_INCLUDE_PATH=/usr/include/gdal
export C_INCLUDE_PATH=/usr/include/gdal

Next, somewhere inside my reqs.txt there's this line:

GDAL==2.1.0  # replace the version with the one you get from gdal-config

I install the packages in my reqs.txt:

pip install -r reqs.txt

Usually this is what it takes for me to set up GDAL so that I'm able to use django.contrib.gis.

I hope this is of help to you.

Answer 3

The problem is that your third image is running in a separate container and GDAL is not available in the first one.

I made geodjango tests running using this docker image wooyek/geodjango from Docker Hub.

Here is the beginning of my config.yml:

version: 2
jobs:
  build:
    docker:
      # image with pre-installed geodjango libs
      - image: wooyek/geodjango

      # postgis database
      - image: circleci/postgres:alpine-postgis-ram
        environment:
          POSTGRES_USER: postgres
          POSTGRES_DB: circle_test