Configuration Options

This page discussed runtime configuration options for GDAL, and is distinct from options to the build-time configure script. Runtime configuration options apply on all platforms, and are evaluated at runtime. They can be set programmatically, by commandline switches or in the environment by the user.

ConfigOptions are normally used to alter the default behavior of GDAL and OGR drivers and in some cases the GDAL and OGR core. They are essentially global variables the user can set.

Setting ConfigOptions

One example of a config option is the GDAL_CACHEMAX option. It controls the size of the GDAL block cache, in megabytes. It can be set in the environment on unix (bash/bourne) shell like this:

export GDAL_CACHEMAX=64

In a DOS/Windows command shell it is done like this:

set GDAL_CACHEMAX=64

It can also be set on the commandline for most GDAL and OGR utilities with the --config switch, though in a few cases these switches are not evaluated in time to affect behavior.

gdal_translate --config GDAL_CACHEMAX 64 in.tif out.tif

In C/C++ configuration switches can be set programmatically like this:

#include "cpl_conv.h"
...
    CPLSetConfigOption( "GDAL_CACHEMAX", "64" );

Normally a configuration option applies to all threads active in a program, but they can be limited to only the current thread this way:

    CPLSetThreadLocalConfigOption( "GDAL_CACHEMAX", "64" );

For boolean options, the values YES, TRUE or ON can be used to turn the option on; NO, FALSE or OFF to turn it off.

What Configuration Options Exist?

Traditionally there hasn't been a good registry of configuration options, and they are often added adhoc to drivers to provide particular workarounds. Below are some of the software wide configuration options. In some cases particular format drivers will document their configuration options, if any, in the user documentation - as is done for the ​JP2KAK and ​ECW drivers.

Generic Options

CPL_DEBUG

This may be set to ON, OFF or specific prefixes. If it is ON, all debug messages are reported to stdout. If it is OFF or unset no debug messages are reported. If it is set to a particular value, then only debug messages with that "type" value will be reported. For instance debug messages from the HFA driver are normally reported with type "HFA" (seen in the message).

At the commandline this can also be set with --debug <value> as well as with --config CPL_DEBUG <value>.

CPL_LOG

This is used for setting the log file path.

CPL_LOG_ERRORS

Set to "ON" for printing error messages. Use together with "CPL_LOG" for directing them into a file.

CPL_TIMESTAMP

CPL_MAX_ERROR_REPORTS

CPL_ACCUM_ERROR_MSG

CPL_TMPDIR

By default, temporary files are written into current working directory. Sometimes this is not optimal and it would be better to write temporary files on bigger or faster drives (SSD).

CPL_VSIL_CURL_ALLOWED_EXTENSIONS

Consider that only the files whose extension ends up with one that is listed in CPL_VSIL_CURL_ALLOWED_EXTENSIONS exist on the server. This can speed up dramatically open experience, in case the server cannot return a file list. For example:

gdalinfo --config CPL_VSIL_CURL_ALLOWED_EXTENSIONS ".tif" /vsicurl/http://igskmncngs506.cr.usgs.gov/gmted/Global_tiles_GMTED/075darcsec/bln/W030/30N030W_20101117_gmted_bln075.tif

CPL_VSIL_CURL_NON_CACHED

A global LRU cache of 16 MB shared among all downloaded content is enabled by default, and content in it may be reused after a file handle has been closed and reopen. Starting with GDAL 2.3, the CPL_VSIL_CURL_NON_CACHED configuration option can be set to values like "/vsis3/bucket/foo.tif:/vsis3/another_bucket/some_directory", so that at file handle closing, all cached content related to the mentionned file(s) is no longer cached. This can help when dealing with resources that can be modified during execution of GDAL related code.

CPL_VSIL_ZIP_ALLOWED_EXTENSIONS

Add to zip FS handler default extensions array (zip, kmz, dwf, ods, xlsx) additional extensions listed in CPL_VSIL_ZIP_ALLOWED_EXTENSIONS config option. The extensions divided by comma.

VSI_CACHE

Starting with GDAL 1.10, when using the VSI interface files can be cached in RAM by setting the configuration option VSI_CACHE to TRUE. The cache size defaults to 25 MB, but can be modified by setting the configuration option VSI_CACHE_SIZE (in bytes).

GDAL_DATA

Path to directory containing various GDAL data files (EPSG CSV files, S-57 definition files, DXF header and footer files, ...).

This option is read by the GDAL and OGR driver registration functions. It is used to expand EPSG codes into their description in the OSR model (WKT based).

On some builds (Unix), the value can be hard-coded at compilation time to point to the path after installation (/usr/share/gdal/data for example). On Windows platform, this option must be generally declared.

GDAL_DISABLE_CPLLOCALEC

If set to YES (default is NO) this option will disable the normal behavior of the CPLLocaleC class which forces the numeric locale to "C" for selected chunks of code using the setlocale() call. Behavior of setlocale() in multi-threaded applications may be undependable but use of this option may result in problem formatting and interpreting numbers properly.

GDAL_FILENAME_IS_UTF8

This option only has an effect on Windows systems (using cpl_vsil_win32.cpp). If set to "NO" (default is YES) then filenames passed to functions like VSIFOpenL() will be passed on directly to CreateFile() instead of being converted from UTF-8 to wchar_t and passed to CreateFileW(). This effectively restores the pre-GDAL1.8 behavior for handling filenames on Windows and might be appropriate for applications that treat filenames as being in the local encoding.

GEOTIFF_CSV

GDAL Options

GDAL_DISABLE_READDIR_ON_OPEN

Defaults to FALSE.

By default (GDAL_DISABLE_READDIR_ON_OPEN=FALSE), GDAL establishes a list of all the files in the directory of the file passed to GDALOpen(). This can result in speed-ups in some use cases, but also to major slow downs when the directory contains thousands of other files. When set to TRUE, GDAL will not try to establish the list of files.

GDAL_CACHEMAX

This option controls the default GDAL raster block cache size. If its value is small (less than 100000), it is assumed to be measured in megabytes, otherwise in bytes. Starting with GDAL 2.1, the value can be set to "X%" to mean X% of the usable physical RAM. Note that this value is only consulted the first time the cache size is requested overriding the initial default (40MB up to GDAL 2.0, 5% of the usable physical RAM starting with GDAL 2.1). To change this value programmatically during operation of the program it is better to use GDALSetCacheMax(int nNewSize) (always in bytes). Since GDAL 1.8.0, it is possible to specify a 64bit value through GDAL_CACHEMAX or with GDALSetCacheMax64(GIntBig nNewSize) (but the maximum practical value on 32 bit OS is between 2 and 4 GB. It is the responsibility of the user to set a consistant value)

GDAL_SKIP

Used by GDALDriverManager::AutoSkipDrivers()

This option can be used to unregister one or several GDAL drivers. This can be useful when a driver tries to open a dataset that it should not recognize, or when several drivers are built-in that can open the same datasets (for example JP2MrSID, JP2ECW, JPEG2000 and JP2KAK for JPEG2000 datasets). The value of this option must be a space delimited list of the short name of the GDAL drivers to unregister.

This option must be set before calling GDALAllRegister(), or an explicit call to GDALDriverManager::AutoSkipDrivers() will be required.

GDAL_DRIVER_PATH

Used by GDALDriverManager::AutoLoadDrivers()

This function will automatically load drivers from shared libraries. It searches the "driver path" for .so (or .dll) files that start with the prefix "gdal_X.so". It then tries to load them and then tries to call a function within them called GDALRegister_X() where the 'X' is the same as the remainder of the shared library basename ('X' is case sensitive), or failing that to call GDALRegisterMe().

There are a few rules for the driver path. If the GDAL_DRIVER_PATH environment variable it set, it is taken to be a list of directories to search separated by colons on UNIX, or semi-colons on Windows. Otherwise the /usr/local/lib/gdalplugins directory, and (if known) the lib/gdalplugins subdirectory of the gdal home directory are searched on UNIX and $(BINDIR)\gdalplugins on Windows.

This option must be set before calling GDALAllRegister(), or an explicit call to GDALDriverManager::AutoLoadDrivers() will be required.

GDAL_FORCE_CACHING

Defaults to NO.

When set to YES, the GDALDataset::RasterIO() and GDALRasterBand::RasterIO() will use cached IO (access block by block through GDALRasterBand::IReadBlock() API) instead of a potential driver specific implementation of IRasterIO(). This will only have an effect on drivers that specialize IRasterIO() at the dataset or raster band level, for example JP2KAK, NITF, HFA, WCS, ECW, MrSID, JPEG, ...

GDAL_VALIDATE_CREATION_OPTIONS

Defaults to YES.

When using GDALDriver::Create() or GDALDriver::CreateCopy() (for example when using the -co option of gdal_translate or gdalwarp utilies) , GDAL checks by default that the passed creation options match the syntax of the allowed options declared by the driver. If they don't match the syntax, a warning will be emitted. There should be hardly any reason to set this option to FALSE, as it's either a sign of a user typo, or an error in the declared options of the driver. The latter should be worth a bug report.

GDAL_IGNORE_AXIS_ORIENTATION

GMLJP2OVERRIDE

GDAL_JP2K_ALT_OFFSETVECTOR_ORDER

GDAL_PAM_ENABLED

PAM support can be enabled (resp. disabled) in GDAL by setting the GDAL_PAM_ENABLED configuration option (via CPLSetConfigOption(), or the environment) to the value of YES (resp. NO). Note: The default value is build dependant and defaults to YES in Windows and Unix builds. See ​GDALPamDataset for more information.

GDAL_PAM_MODE

GDAL_PAM_PROXY_DIR

GDAL_MAX_DATASET_POOL_SIZE

Defaults to 100. Used by gcore/gdalproxypool.cpp

Number of datasets that can be opened simultaneously by the GDALProxyPool mechanism (used by VRT for example). Can be increased to get better random I/O performance with VRT mosaics made of numerous underlying raster files. Be careful : on Linux systems, the number of file handles that can be opened by a process is generally limited to 1024.

GDAL_SWATH_SIZE

Defaults to 10000000 (10 MB). Used by gcore/rasterio.cpp

Size of the swath when copying raster data from one dataset to another one (in bytes). Should not be smaller than GDAL_CACHEMAX

USE_RRD

Defaults to NO. Used by gcore/gdaldefaultoverviews.cpp

Can be set to YES to use Erdas Imagine format (.aux) as overview format. See ​gdaladdo documentation.

GeoTIFF driver options

All the below options are documented in the ​GTiff driver documentation.

GTIFF_IGNORE_READ_ERRORS

ESRI_XML_PAM

JPEG_QUALITY_OVERVIEW

GDAL_TIFF_INTERNAL_MASK

GDAL_TIFF_INTERNAL_MASK_TO_8BIT

TIFF_USE_OVR

GTIFF_POINT_GEO_IGNORE

GTIFF_REPORT_COMPD_CS

GDAL_ENABLE_TIFF_SPLIT

GDAL_TIFF_OVR_BLOCKSIZE

GRIB driver options

All the below options are documented in the ​GRIB driver documentation.

GRIB_NORMALIZE_UNITS

GDAL/OGR HTTP options

CPL_CURL_VERBOSE

Set to "YES" to get the curl library to display a lot of verbose information about its operations. Very useful for libcurl and/or protocol debugging and understanding.

GDAL_HTTP_AUTH

Set value to [BASIC/NTLM/GSSNEGOTIATE/ANY] to tell libcurl which authentication method(s) you want it to use. See ​http://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/c/curl_easy_setopt.html#CURLOPTHTTPAUTH for more information.

GDAL_HTTP_USERPWD

The HTTP user and password to use for the connection. Must be in the form of [user name]:[password]. Use GDAL_HTTP_AUTH to decide the authentication method.

When using NTLM, you can set the domain by prepending it to the user name and separating the domain and name with a forward (/) or backward slash (\). Like this: "domain/user:password" or "domain\user:password". Some HTTP servers (on Windows) support this style even for Basic authentication.

GDAL_HTTP_PROXY

Set HTTP proxy to use. The parameter should be the host name or dotted IP address. To specify port number in this string, append :[port] to the end of the host name. The proxy string may be prefixed with [protocol]: since any such prefix will be ignored. The proxy's port number may optionally be specified with the separate option. If not specified, libcurl will default to using port 1080 for proxies.

GDAL respects the environment variables http_proxy, ftp_proxy, all_proxy etc, if any of those are set. GDAL_HTTP_PROXY option does however override any possibly set environment variables.

GDAL_HTTP_PROXYUSERPWD

The HTTP user and password to use for the connection to the HTTP proxy. Must be in the form of [user name]:[password].

GDAL_PROXY_AUTH

Set value to [BASIC/NTLM/DIGEST/ANY] to tell libcurl which authentication method(s) you want it to use for your proxy authentication. See ​http://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/c/curl_easy_setopt.html#CURLOPTPROXYAUTH for more information

CPL_CURL_GZIP

Sets the contents of the Accept-Encoding header sent in a HTTP request to gzip, and enables decoding of a response when a Content-Encoding: header

GDAL_HTTP_TIMEOUT

Set HTTP timeout value, where value is in seconds

GDAL_HTTP_USERAGENT

When set this string is will be used to set the User-Agent: header in the http request sent to the remote server

GDAL_HTTP_UNSAFESSL

Set to "YES" to get the curl library to skip SSL host / certificate verification.

OGR Options

PROJSO

Used by ogr/ogrct.cpp

The name of the PROJ.4 DLL or shared library to try and load at runtime. For example "/home/bob/libproj.so". If not set, OGR will try to load :

• libproj.so on Linux/Unix platforms
• proj.dll on Windows platforms
• libproj.dylib on MacOSX platforms
• libproj-0.dll on MinGW32 builds
• cygproj-0.dll on Cygwin builds

CENTER_LONG

CHECK_WITH_INVERT_PROJ

Used by ogr/ogrct.cpp and apps/gdalwarp.cpp. Added in GDAL/OGR 1.7.0

This option can be used to control the behaviour of gdalwarp when warping global datasets or when transforming from/to polar projections, which causes coordinates discontinuities. See http://trac.osgeo.org/gdal/ticket/2305.

The background is that proj.4 does not guarantee that converting from src_srs to dst_srs and then from dst_srs to src_srs will yield to the initial coordinates. This can cause to errors in the computation of the target bounding box of gdalwarp, or to visual artifacts.

If CHECK_WITH_INVERT_PROJ option is not set, gdalwarp will check that the the computed coordinates of the edges of the target image are in the validity area of the target projection. If they are not, it will retry computing them by setting CHECK_WITH_INVERT_PROJ=TRUE that forces ogrct.cpp to check the consistency of each requested projection result with the invert projection.

If set to NO, gdalwarp will behave like GDAL/OGR < 1.7.0

THRESHOLD

Used by ogr/ogrct.cpp. Added in GDAL/OGR 1.7.0

Used in combination with CHECK_WITH_INVERT_PROJ=TRUE. Define the acceptable threshold used to check if the roundtrip from src_srs to dst_srs and from dst_srs to srs_srs yield to the initial coordinates. The value must be expressed in the units of the source SRS (typically degrees for a geographic SRS, meters for a projected SRS)

OGR_DEBUG_ORGANIZE_POLYGONS

Used by OGRGeometryFactory::organizePolygons(). Defaults to NO.

If set to YES, organizePolygons(), which is in particular used when reading Shapefiles with Polygon geometry, will use GEOS to check the topological relationship of the subparts of multipolygons. This will slow down processing. There should be no reason to set this option to YES, except for debugging purposes.

OGR_ARC_STEPSIZE

Used by OGR_G_CreateFromGML() (for gml:Arc and gml:Circle) and OGRGeometryFactory::approximateArcAngles() to stroke arc to linestrings. Defaults to 4 (degrees). Added in GDAL/OGR 1.8.0

The largest step in degrees along the arc.

OGR_ENABLE_PARTIAL_REPROJECTION

Used by OGRLineString::transform(). Defaults to NO. Added in GDAL/OGR 1.8.0

Can be set to YES to remove points that can't be reprojected. See #3758 for the purpose of this option.

OGR_FORCE_ASCII

Used by OGRGetXML_UTF8_EscapedString() function and by GPX, KML, GeoRSS and GML drivers. Defaults to YES

Those XML based drivers should write UTF8 content. If they are provided with non UTF8 content, they will replace each non-ASCII character by '?' when OGR_FORCE_ASCII=YES.

Set to NO to preserve the content, but beware that the resulting XML file will not be valid and will require manual edition of the encoding in the XML header.

SHAPE_ENCODING

Added in GDAL/OGR 1.9.0.

Shapefile driver specific. This may be set to a OGR Character Encoding name in order to force all DBF files opened with the shapefile driver to be treated as having that encoding instead of trying to interpret the encoding setting of the file itself.

DXF_ENCODING

DXF driver specific. This may be set to a OGR Character Encoding name in order to force all DXF files opened with the DXF driver to be treated as having that encoding instead of trying to interpret the encoding setting of the file itself.

GML_INVERT_AXIS_ORDER_IF_LAT_LONG

GML driver specific. Added in GDAL/OGR 1.8.0. See ​GML driver documentation. Also impacts WFS driver behaviour.

GML_CONSIDER_EPSG_AS_URN

GML driver specific. Added in GDAL/OGR 1.8.0. See ​GML driver documentation. Also impacts WFS driver behaviour.

GML_SAVE_RESOLVED_TO

GML driver specific. Added in GDAL/OGR 1.8.0. See ​GML driver documentation.

GML_SKIP_RESOLVE_ELEMS

GML driver specific. Added in GDAL/OGR 1.8.0. See ​GML driver documentation.

GML_FIELDTYPES

GML driver specific. See ​GML driver documentation.

GML_GFS_TEMPLATE

GML driver specific. Added in GDAL/OGR 1.9.0. See ​GML driver documentation.

GML_EXPOSE_FID

GML driver specific. Added in GDAL/OGR 1.9.0. See ​GML driver documentation.

GML_EXPOSE_GML_ID

GML driver specific. Added in GDAL/OGR 1.9.0. See ​GML driver documentation.

OGR_WFS_PAGING_ALLOWED

WFS driver specific. Added in GDAL/OGR 1.8.0. See ​WFS driver documentation.

OGR_WFS_PAGE_SIZE

WFS driver specific. Added in GDAL/OGR 1.8.0. See ​WFS driver documentation.

OGR_WFS_BASE_START_INDEX

WFS driver specific. Added in GDAL/OGR 1.10. The default base start index is 0, as mandated by the specification. The OGR_WFS_BASE_START_INDEX configuration option can however be set to 1 to be compatible with the server implementations that considered the first feature to be at index 1.

OGR_WFS_USE_STREAMING

WFS driver specific. Added in GDAL/OGR 1.10. The WFS driver will read the GML content as a stream instead as a whole file, which will improve interactivity and help when the content cannot fit into memory. This can be turned off by setting the OGR_WFS_USE_STREAMING configuration option to NO if this is not desirable (for example, when iterating several times on a layer that can fit into memory).

OGR_WFS_LOAD_MULTIPLE_LAYER_DEFN

WFS driver specific. Added in GDAL/OGR 1.9.0. Can be set to OFF to prevent emitting DescribeFeatureType for multiple layers at once (which is the new behaviour of the WFS driver in OGR 1.9.0 for better efficiency)

SQLITE_LIST_ALL_TABLES

SQLite driver specific. Set to "YES" to list all tables (not just the tables listed in the geometry_columns table)

OGR_SQLITE_LIST_VIRTUAL_OGR

Sqlite driver specific. Added in GDAL/OGR 1.10. Set to "YES" to list VirtualOGR layers. Defaults to "NO" as there might be some security implications if a user is provided with a file and doesn't know that there are virtual OGR tables in it.

OGR_EDIGEO_FONT_SIZE_FACTOR

EDIGEO driver specific. Added in GDAL/OGR 1.9.0. See ​EDIGEO driver documentation.

OGR_EDIGEO_CREATE_LABEL_LAYERS

EDIGEO driver specific. Added in GDAL/OGR 1.9.0. See ​EDIGEO driver documentation.

OGR_EDIGEO_RECODE_TO_UTF8

EDIGEO driver specific. Added in GDAL/OGR 1.9.0. Can be set to OFF to prevent recoding strings in LATIN-1 to UTF-8.

OGR_SKIP

This option can be used to unregister one or several OGR drivers. This can be useful when a driver tries to open a datasource that it should not recognize, or when several drivers are built-in that can open the same datasets (for example KML, LIBKML datasources). The value of this option must be a comma delimited list of the short name of the OGR drivers to unregister.

OSM_CONFIG_FILE

OSM driver specific. The default configuration file for OSM driver is an osmconf.ini file in the data folder of the GDAL distribution. An alternate path can be set this configuration option.

OSM_MAX_TMPFILE_SIZE

OSM driver specific. By default tempfile is kept in RAM if it remains under 100 MB and thereafter on disk. The threshold can be adjusted with this configuration option.

SXF_RSC_FILENAME

SXF driver specific. The driver uses classifiers (RSC files) to map feature from SXF to layers. To be used automatically, the RSC file should have the same name as SXF file. User can provide RSC file path using config option SXF_RSC_FILENAME. This config option overrides the use of same name RSC.

SXF_LAYER_FULLNAME

SXF driver specific. This option allows choosing which layer names to use. If SXF_LAYER_FULLNAME is TRUE - the driver uses long names, if FALSE - short

SXF_SET_VERTCS

SXF driver specific. Add to SRS of SXF layers VERT_CS if it present in map description section of the file. Default is NO.

OGR_PG_RETRIEVE_FID

PostGIS driver specific. Retrieve FID after insert feature. Default is TRUE.

OGR_PG_CURSOR_PAGE

PostgreSQL driver specific. Set the number of rows retrieved for each cursor fetch.

PG_USE_COPY

This may be "YES" for using COPY for inserting data to PostgreSQL. COPY is significantly faster than INSERT. Starting with GDAL 2.0, COPY is used by default when inserting from a table that has just been created.

PG_USE_BASE64

(GDAL >= 1.8.0) If set to "YES", geometries will be fetched as BASE64 encoded EWKB instead of canonical HEX encoded EWKB. This reduces the amount of data to be transferred from 2 N to 1.333 N, where N is the size of EWKB data. However, it might be a bit slower than fetching in canonical form when the client and the server are on the same machine, so the default is NO.

OGR_TRUNCATE

(GDAL >= 1.11) If set to "YES", the content of the table will be first erased with the SQL TRUNCATE command before inserting the first feature. This is an alternative to using the -overwrite flag of ogr2ogr, that avoids views based on the table to be destroyed. Typical use case: "ogr2ogr -append PG:dbname=foo abc.shp --config OGR_TRUNCATE YES".

TAB_APPROX_GEOTRANSFORM

When reading a .tab file for raster georeferencing (for example with a .tif), tell if an approximate geotransform from the GCP of the .tab file is acceptable. Default is FALSE. (GDAL >= 2.0)

SHAPE_RESTORE_SHX

Added in GDAL/OGR 2.1.0.

Shapefile driver specific. If set to YES driver try to restore/build a missing .shx file