Easily testing the latest version of GDAL

GDAL is one of the cornerstones of the open source geospatial stack (and actually of many of the proprietary systems as well).
If you want to use or test the latest features this can be done quite easily by setting a few environment variables:

	export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/home/johan/git/gdal/gdal/.libs:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
	export GDAL_DATA=/home/johan/git/gdal/gdal/data
	export PATH=$PATH:/home/johan/git/gdal/gdal/apps

view raw latest_gdal.sh hosted with ❤ by GitHub

I save this commands in a file new_gdal.sh. After running

source new_gdal.sh

You will be able to use all the latest gdal tools.

johan@x1:~$ source ~/latest_gdal.sh 
johan@x1:~$ gdalinfo --version
GDAL 2.3.0dev, released 2017/99/99

Actually if you use this command, also tools dynamically linked to gdal will be using this latest version.

johan@x1:~$ saga_cmd io_gdal
____________________________

   #####   ##   #####    ##
  ###     ###  ##       ###
   ###   # ## ##  #### # ##
    ### ##### ##    # #####
 ##### #   ##  ##### #   ##
____________________________

SAGA Version: 6.4.0


Library: GDAL/OGR
Category: Import/Export
File: /usr/local/lib/saga/libio_gdal.so
Description:
Interface to Frank Warmerdam's Geospatial Data Abstraction Library (GDAL).
Version 2.3.0dev

Note that this will work well for packages dynamically linked to the C api. If packages are linked to the C++ api, they may need recompilation.

If you are on windows, you could have a look at SDKShell.bat (part of the builds from Tamas Szekeres).

Note: I actually wrote this blogpost because in his presentation on FOSDEM Jeremy Mayeres recommended using Docker for using the latest version of GDAL. I think that solution is overkill for desktop usage, and using environment variables is easier.