Geospatial Commandline Tools

A collection of geospatial programs with commandline interface. The starting point of the list was this tweet which contains many useful responses.

Generic Vector & Raster

• GDAL/OGR - Powerful tools for conversion and processing of most geospatial formats.
• QGIS/qgis_process - Interface for accessing QGIS processing tools.
• GRASS - Execute GRASS GIS algorithms.
• SAGA GIS - Execute SAGA GIS algorithms.
• Whitebox Tools - Execute geospatial algorithms.

Vector

• Fiona - Process vector data.
• shp2pgsql / pgsql2shp / shpdump Shapefile related tools.
• spatialite - A SQLite bases database for spatial data.
• topojson - Handling the TopoJSON format.
• geojsonhint - Validate GeoJSON files.
• csv2geojson - Convert CSV to GeoJSON.
• d3-geo - Geographic projections, spherical shapes and spherical trigonometry.
• d3-geo-projection - Extended geographic projections for d3-geo.
• geojson-merge - Merge multiple GeoJSON files.
• Mapshaper - Convert between Shapefile, GeoJSON, TopoJSON and CSV.
• geojsonio - Display GeoJSON files in the browser.
• wellknown - Handle WKT (well known text) geometries.
• ogr2postgis - Load vector data to PostGIS.

Raster & Remote Sensing

• Rasterio - Process raster data.
• libtiff - TIFF Library and Utilities.
• Orfeo ToolBox A toolbox for remote sensing.
• OpenDroneMap - Process drone imagery.
• TauDEM - a suite of Digital Elevation Model (DEM) tools.
• felicette - Download satellite images.
• eodag - Earth Observation Data Access Gateway.
• micmac - Photogrammetric suite.
• sat-search - Access SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog (STAC) API.
• PkTools - Utilities for image processing.
• go-spatial - Manipulation of geospatial data.
• stactools - Command line utility and Python library for STAC.
• gdal-exprtk - GDAL-based raster calculation with JavaScript and ExprTk expresssions.
• cogger - GeoTIFF to COG converter.
• geeup - Simple tool for Google Earth Engine uploads.

Rendering and Styling

• GMT - Display geospatial data.
• mapnik - Mapping Toolkit.
• GeoStyler - Conversion from and to various geospatial style formats.
• carto - Edit CartCSS styles.
• t-Rex - Creation and Serving of vector tiles.
• tippecanoe - Build vector tiles.
• mbgl-renderer - Static Renderer for MapboxGL.
• BareMaps - Creation of custom vector tiles.
• Mapproxy - Proxy for geospatial data.
• pygeoapi - A Python server implementation of the OGC API suite of standards.
• pg_tileserv - A PostGIS-only tile server in Go.
• pg_featureserv - Geospatial Feature Server for PostGIS in Go.

OpenStreetMap

• osmium - Powertool for any type of OpenStreetMap data processing.
• pyosmium - Utilities for updating OSM files.
• osm2pgsql - Load OpenStreetMap data in a PostgreSQL/PostGIS Database. Written in C++.
• osmprj - Import OSM data to Postgres and create reports.
• osmtogeojson - Convert OpenStreetMap XML to GeoJSON.
• Imposm - Load OpenStreetMap data in a PostgreSQL/PostGIS Database. Written in Go.
• osmctools - Convert, filter and update OpenStreetMap data files.
• osm-tags-transform - Transform tags in OSM files using Lua code.
• mapsplit - Split OSM data in to a portable tiled format.
• 99boundaries - Generate administrative boundaries from OpenStreetMap.
• gol - Build an OpenStreetMap database and perform queries.

Point Cloud

• PDAL - Point Data Abstraction Library.
• CloudCompare - Tools for processing point clouds.
• OPALS - Processing of airborn laser scanning.
• LAStools - Tools for processing point clouds.

Other

• PROJ - Converts coordinate reference systems.
• pyproj - Python interface to PROJ.
• GEOS - Performs geometric operations.
• pygeometa - Create geospatial metadata.
• MDAL - Mesh Data Abstraction Library.
• valhalla - Routing Engine.
• PCRaster - Software for environmental modelling.
• Cesium Terrain Builder - Create terrain tiles for use in the Cesium JavaScript library.
• geodiff - Handle differences in geospatial data.
• GeoGig - Geospatial version control.
• Kart - Geospatial version control.
• mergin - Python client module for access to Mergin and a command-line tool for access to data stored in Mergin.
• wetterdienst - Retrieve weather data from multiple sources.

Links

• Command-Line Cartography - Blog Post Series of Mike Bostock.
• Vector Tiles - Section about vector tile related CLI tools.
• Fiona/Rasterio Cheatsheet
• Talk: Are be going back to Command Line GIS
• Slides: Command-Line Geography