Installing GDAL in a Conda Environment for VS Code

Introduction

This guide provides a step-by-step guide to installing GDAL in a Conda environment for use in VS Code. This guide is intended for Windows users.

Open Anaconda Prompt
Create a new Conda environment
```
conda create -n gdal_env python=3.11
```
Activate the new Conda environment conda activate gdal_env
Install GDAL In your browser, go to https://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/#gdal and download the appropriate GDAL wheel file for your system. For example, if you are using Python 3.11 on a 64-bit system, download GDAL‑3.3.2‑cp311‑cp311‑win_amd64.whl.
Go to your downloads folder
```
cd Downloads
```
Install GDAL (using the file name from step 4, which you can just ctrl+v into the command) python -m pip install GDAL‑3.3.2‑cp311‑cp311‑win_amd64.whl
Check GDAL installation python -m pip show gdal

Import gdal in anacoda prompt

>>> from osgeo import gdal
>>> from osgeo import ogr
>>> from osgeo import osr
>>> quit()

Install other packages cd .. (to go back to the base directory) conda install numpy conda install pandas conda install matplotlib conda install seaborn conda install -c conda-forge geopandas
Go to VS code and open new file Ctrl+Shift+P Python: Create New Blank Jupyter Notebook
Select the new conda environment (you need to select the gdal_env that you created) Ctrl+Shift+P Python: Select Interpreter gdal_env

ensure that the downloaded GDAL wheel file is in your downloads folder and matches your python version and system architecture
verify that you have necessary permissions to install packages

ensure that you have the VS Code Python Extension installed
restart VS Code after setting up the Conda environment to refresh interpreter list
if env still doesn't show up, try manually entering the path to the python exe in the gdal env

You should now have a working GDAL environment in VS Code. You can now use GDAL in VS Code to read and write raster and vector data.