Installing GeoDjango on Ubuntu 12.04

Joel McCune

Jan 6, 2014 • 1 min read

Although not very good at it, I have been toying with what I can do with Django. Right now it admittedly is not much. It is rather pathetic, really. Still, being a GIS guy, when stumbling across GeoDjango, I was curious. It took some rough hacking to get something working, but here is what I have come up with so far.

Add the UbuntuGIS PPA

I am adding the stable PPA repository, adding it using the follwoing command.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntugis/ppa

Install software

Get going and install a heck of a lot of software. There are going to be dependencies galore, so you may as well get comfortable.

sudo apt-get install python-gdal python-mapnik2 python-pyproj postgresql-9.1 postgis pgadmin3 libspatialite3 spatialite-gui

Although these packages may not look much different than what you would normally get, by adding the UbuntuGIS source, the packages are more current versions of the same software. Specifically and most notable, PostGIS in Ubuntu 12.04 is version 1.5, but by using this repository, you are getting 2.0.1.

Also, you may notice we are adding two database options for working with Django, PostgreSQL with PostGIS and SpatialLite, the spatial extension for Sqlite. It is entirely up to you (obviously), but my thought is to have both to see what GeoDjango can do. Best of luck and please let me know your mileage if you decide to try this.