Version 2.x

Version 2.x#

Version 2.0.6 (2024-08-19)#

Bug fixes:

  • Fix compatibility with NumPy 2.1.0 (#2099).

Wheels are available for Python 3.13 (and still include GEOS 3.11.4).

Version 2.0.5 (2024-07-13)#

Bug fixes:

  • Fix Point x/y/z attributes to return Python floats (#2074).

  • Fix affinity for Apple silicon with NumPy 2.0 by reverting matmul, and use direct matrix multiplication instead (#2085).

Packaging related:

  • Binary wheels on PyPI include GEOS 3.11.4 from 2024-06-05 (#2086).

  • universal2 wheels are removed for macOS since both x86_64 and arm64 wheels are provided (#1990).

  • Replace pkg_resources, prepend numpy include dirs (#2071).

Version 2.0.4 (2024-04-16)#

Bug fixes:

  • Fix bug in to_wkt with multiple empty Z geometries (#2012).

  • Fix bug in to_ragged_array for an array of Points with missing values (#2034).

Wheels for Python versions >= 3.9 will be compatible with the upcoming NumPy 2.0 release (as well as with supported NumPy 1.x versions).

Version 2.0.3 (2024-02-16)#

Bug fixes:

  • Fix regression in the oriented_envelope ufunc to accept array-like input in case of GEOS<3.12 (#1929).

Packaging related:

  • The binary wheels are not yet compatible with a future NumPy 2.0 release, therefore a numpy<2 upper pin was added to the requirements (#1972).

  • Upgraded the GEOS version in the binary wheel distributions to 3.11.3.

Version 2.0.2 (2023-10-12)#

Bug fixes:

  • Fix regression in the (in)equality comparison (geom1 == geom2) using __eq__ to not ignore the z-coordinates (#1732).

  • Fix MultiPolygon() constructor to accept polygons without holes (#1850).

  • Fix minimum_rotated_rectangle() (oriented_envelope()) to always return the minimum area solution (instead of minimum width). In practice, it will use the GEOS implementation only for GEOS 3.12+, and for older GEOS versions fall back to the implementation that was included in Shapely < 2.

Wheels are available for Python 3.12 (and still include GEOS 3.11.2). Building from source is now compatible with Cython 3.

Version 2.0.1 (2023-01-30)#

Bug fixes:

  • Fix regression in the Polygon() constructor taking a sequence of Points (#1662).

  • Fix regression in the geometry constructors when passing decimal.Decimal coordinate values (#1707).

  • Fix STRtree() to not make the passed geometry array immutable as side-effect of the constructor (#1714).

  • Fix the directed keyword in shapely.ops.linemerge() (#1695).

Improvements:

  • Expose the function to get a matplotlib Patch object from a (Multi)Polygon (without already plotting it) publicly as shapely.plotting.patch_from_polygon() (#1704).

Acknowledgments#

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release! People with a “+” by their names contributed a patch for the first time.

  • Brendan Ward

  • Erik Pettersson +

  • Hood Chatham +

  • Idan Miara +

  • Joris Van den Bossche

  • Martin Fleischmann

  • Michał Górny +

  • Sebastian Castro +

Version 2.0.0 (2022-12-12)#

Shapely 2.0 version is a major release featuring a complete refactor of the internals and new vectorized (element-wise) array operations, providing considerable performance improvements (based on the developments in the PyGEOS package), along with several breaking API changes and many feature improvements.

For more background, see RFC 1: Roadmap for Shapely 2.0.

Refactor of the internals#

Shapely wraps the GEOS C++ library for use in Python. Before 2.0, Shapely used ctypes to link to GEOS at runtime, but doing so resulted in extra overhead and installation challenges. With 2.0, the internals of Shapely have been refactored to expose GEOS functionality through a Python C extension module that is compiled in advance.

The pointer to the actual GEOS Geometry object is stored in a lightweight Python extension type. A single Geometry Python extension type is defined in C wrapping a GEOSGeometry pointer. This extension type is further subclassed in Python to provide the geometry type-specific classes from Shapely (Point, LineString, Polygon, etc). The GEOS pointer is accessible from C as a static attribute of the Python object (an attribute of the C struct that makes up a Python object), which enables using vectorized functions within C and thus avoiding Python overhead while looping over an array of geometries (see next section).

Vectorized (element-wise) geometry operations#

Before the 2.0 release, Shapely only provided an interface for scalar (individual) geometry objects. Users had to loop over individual geometries within an array of geometries and call scalar methods or properties, which is both more verbose to use and has a large performance overhead.

Shapely 2.0 exposes GEOS operations as vectorized functions that operate on arrays of geometries using a familiar NumPy interface. Those functions are implemented as NumPy universal functions (or ufunc for short). A universal function is a function that operates on n-dimensional arrays in an element-by-element fashion and supports array broadcasting. All loops over geometries are implemented in C, which results in substantial performance improvements when performing operations using many geometries. This also allows operations to be less verbose.

NumPy is now a required dependency.

An example of this functionality using a small array of points and a single polygon:

>>> import shapely
>>> from shapely import Point, box
>>> import numpy as np
>>> geoms = np.array([Point(0, 0), Point(1, 1), Point(2, 2)])
>>> polygon = box(0, 0, 2, 2)

Before Shapely 2.0, a for loop was required to operate over an array of geometries:

>>> [polygon.contains(point) for point in geoms]
[False,  True, False]

In Shapely 2.0, we can now compute whether the points are contained in the polygon directly with one function call:

>>> shapely.contains(polygon, geoms)
array([False,  True, False])

This results in a considerable speedup, especially for larger arrays of geometries, as well as a nicer user interface that avoids the need to write for loops. Depending on the operation, this can give a performance increase with factors of 4x to 100x. In general, the greatest speedups are for lightweight GEOS operations, such as contains, which would previously have been dominated by the high overhead of for loops in Python. See https://caspervdw.github.io/Introducing-Pygeos/ for more detailed examples.

The new vectorized functions are available in the top-level shapely namespace. All the familiar geospatial methods and attributes from the geometry classes now have an equivalent as top-level function (with some small name deviations, such as the .wkt attribute being available as a to_wkt() function). Some methods from submodules (for example, several functions from the shapely.ops submodule such as polygonize()) are also made available in a vectorized version as top-level function.

A full list of functions can be found in the API docs (see the pages listed under “API REFERENCE” in the left sidebar).

  • Vectorized constructor functions

  • Optionally output to a user-specified array (out keyword argument) when constructing geometries from indices.

  • Enable bulk construction of geometries with different number of coordinates by optionally taking index arrays in all creation functions.

Shapely 2.0 API changes (deprecated in 1.8)#

The Shapely 1.8 release included several deprecation warnings about API changes that would happen in Shapely 2.0 and that can be fixed in your code (making it compatible with both <=1.8 and >=2.0). See Migrating to Shapely 1.8 / 2.0 for more details on how to update your code.

It is highly recommended to first upgrade to Shapely 1.8 and resolve all deprecation warnings before upgrading to Shapely 2.0.

Summary of changes:

  • Geometries are now immutable and hashable.

  • Multi-part geometries such as MultiPolygon no longer behave as “sequences”. This means that they no longer have a length, are not iterable, and are not indexable anymore. Use the .geoms attribute instead to access individual parts of a multi-part geometry.

  • Geometry objects no longer directly implement the numpy array interface to expose their coordinates. To convert to an array of coordinates, use the .coords attribute instead (np.asarray(geom.coords)).

  • The following attributes and methods on the Geometry classes were previously deprecated and are now removed from Shapely 2.0:

    • array_interface() and ctypes

    • asShape(), and the adapters classes to create geometry-like proxy objects (use shape() instead).

    • empty() method

Some new deprecations have been introduced in Shapely 2.0:

  • Directly calling the base class BaseGeometry() constructor or the EmptyGeometry() constructor is deprecated and will raise an error in the future. To create an empty geometry, use one of the subclasses instead, for example GeometryCollection() (#1022).

  • The shapely.speedups module (the enable and disable functions) is deprecated and will be removed in the future. The module no longer has any affect in Shapely >=2.0.

Breaking API changes#

Some additional backwards incompatible API changes were included in Shapely 2.0 that were not deprecated in Shapely 1.8:

  • Consistent creation of empty geometries (for example Polygon() now actually creates an empty Polygon instead of an empty geometry collection).

  • The .bounds attribute of an empty geometry now returns a tuple of NaNs instead of an empty tuple (#1023).

  • The preserve_topology keyword of simplify() now defaults to True (#1392).

  • A GeometryCollection that consists of all empty sub-geometries now returns those empty geometries from its .geoms attribute instead of returning an empty list (#1420).

  • The Point(..) constructor no longer accepts a sequence of coordinates consisting of more than one coordinate pair (previously, subsequent coordinates were ignored) (#1600).

  • The unused shape_factory() method and HeterogeneousGeometrySequence class are removed (#1421).

  • The undocumented __geom__ attribute has been removed. If necessary (although not recommended for use beyond experimentation), use the _geom attribute to access the raw GEOS pointer (#1417).

  • The logging functionality has been removed. All error messages from GEOS are now raised as Python exceptions (#998).

  • Several custom exception classes defined in shapely.errors that are no longer used internally have been removed. Errors from GEOS are now raised as GEOSException (#1306).

The STRtree interface has been substantially changed. See the section below for more details.

Additionally, starting with GEOS 3.11 (which is included in the binary wheels on PyPI), the behaviour of the parallel_offset (offset_curve) method changed regarding the orientation of the resulting line. With GEOS < 3.11, the line retains the same direction for a left offset (positive distance) or has opposite direction for a right offset (negative distance), and this behaviour was documented as such in previous Shapely versions. Starting with GEOS 3.11, the function tries to preserve the orientation of the original line.

New features#

Geometry subclasses are now available in the top-level namespace#

Following the new vectorized functions in the top-level shapely namespace, the Geometry subclasses (Point, LineString, Polygon, etc) are now available in the top-level namespace as well. Thus it is no longer needed to import those from the shapely.geometry submodule.

The following:

from shapely.geometry import Point

can be replaced with:

from shapely import Point

or:

import shapely
shapely.Point(...)

Note: for backwards compatibility (and being able to write code that works for both <=1.8 and >2.0), those classes still remain accessible from the shapely.geometry submodule as well.

More informative repr with truncated WKT#

The repr (__repr__) of Geometry objects has been simplified and improved to include a descriptive Well-Known-Text (WKT) formatting. Instead of showing the class name and id:

>>> Point(0, 0)
<shapely.geometry.point.Point at 0x7f0b711f1310>

we now get:

>>> Point(0, 0)
<POINT (0 0)>

For large geometries with many coordinates, the output gets truncated to 80 characters.

Support for fixed precision model for geometries and in overlay functions#

GEOS 3.9.0 overhauled the overlay operations (union, intersection, (symmetric) difference). A complete rewrite, dubbed “OverlayNG”, provides a more robust implementation (no more TopologyExceptions even on valid input), the ability to specify the output precision model, and significant performance optimizations. When installing Shapely with GEOS >= 3.9 (which is the case for PyPI wheels and conda-forge packages), you automatically get these improvements (also for previous versions of Shapely) when using the overlay operations.

Shapely 2.0 also includes the ability to specify the precision model directly:

  • The set_precision() function can be used to conform a geometry to a certain grid size (may round and reduce coordinates), and this will then also be used by subsequent overlay methods. A get_precision() function is also available to inspect the precision model of geometries.

  • The grid_size keyword in the overlay methods can also be used to specify the precision model of the output geometry (without first conforming the input geometries).

Releasing the GIL for multithreaded applications#

Shapely itself is not multithreaded, but its functions generally allow for multithreading by releasing the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) during execution. Normally in Python, the GIL prevents multiple threads from computing at the same time. Shapely functions internally release this constraint so that the heavy lifting done by GEOS can be done in parallel, from a single Python process.

STRtree API changes and improvements#

The biggest change in the STRtree interface is that all operations now return indices of the input tree or query geometries, instead of the geometries itself. These indices can be used to index into anything associated with the input geometries, including the input geometries themselves, or custom items stored in another object of the same length and order as the geometries.

In addition, Shapely 2.0 includes several improvements to STRtree:

  • Directly include predicate evaluation in STRtree.query() by specifying the predicate keyword. If a predicate is provided, tree geometries with bounding boxes that overlap the bounding boxes of the input geometries are further filtered to those that meet the predicate (using prepared geometries under the hood for efficiency).

  • Query multiple input geometries (spatial join style) with STRtree.query() by passing an array of geometries. In this case, the return value is a 2D array with shape (2, n) where the subarrays correspond to the indices of the input geometries and indices of the tree geometries associated with each.

  • A new STRtree.query_nearest() method was added, returning the index of the nearest geometries in the tree for each input geometry. Compared to STRtree.nearest(), which only returns the index of a single nearest geometry for each input geometry, this new methods allows for:

    • returning all equidistant nearest geometries,

    • excluding nearest geometries that are equal to the input,

    • specifying an max_distance to limit the search radius, potentially increasing the performance,

    • optionally returning the distance.

  • Fixed STRtree creation to allow querying the tree in a multi-threaded context.

Bindings for new GEOS functionalities#

Several (new) functions from GEOS are now exposed in Shapely:

In addition some aliases for existing methods have been added to provide a method name consistent with GEOS or PostGIS:

Getting information / parts / coordinates from geometries#

A set of GEOS getter functions are now also exposed to inspect geometries:

Several functions are added to extract parts:

Methods to extract all parts or coordinates at once have been added:

  • The get_parts() function can be used to get individual parts of an array of multi-part geometries.

  • The get_rings() function, similar as get_parts but specifically to extract the rings of Polygon geometries.

  • The get_coordinates() function to get all coordinates from a geometry or array of geometries as an array of floats.

Each of those three functions has an optional return_index keyword, which allows to also return the indexes of the original geometries in the source array.

Prepared geometries#

Prepared geometries are now no longer separate objects, but geometry objects themselves can be prepared (this makes the shapely.prepared module superfluous).

The prepare() function generates a GEOS prepared geometry which is stored on the Geometry object itself. All binary predicates (except equals) will make use of this if the input geometry has already been prepared. Helper functions destroy_prepared() and is_prepared() are also available.

New IO methods (GeoJSON, ragged arrays)#

Other improvements#

  • Added force_2d() and force_3d() to change the dimensionality of the coordinates in a geometry.

  • Addition of a total_bounds() function to return the outer bounds of an array of geometries.

  • Added empty() to create a geometry array pre-filled with None or with empty geometries.

  • Performance improvement in constructing LineStrings or LinearRings from numpy arrays for GEOS >= 3.10.

  • Updated the box() ufunc to use internal C function for creating polygon (about 2x faster) and added ccw parameter to create polygon in counterclockwise (default) or clockwise direction.

  • Start of a benchmarking suite using ASV.

  • Added shapely.testing.assert_geometries_equal.

Bug fixes#

  • Fixed several corner cases in WKT and WKB serialization for varying GEOS versions, including:

    • Fixed the WKT serialization of single part 3D empty geometries to correctly include “Z” (for GEOS >= 3.9.0).

    • Handle empty points in WKB serialization by conversion to POINT (nan, nan) consistently for all GEOS versions (GEOS started doing this for >= 3.9.0).

Acknowledgments#

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release! People with a “+” by their names contributed a patch for the first time.

  • Adam J. Stewart +

  • Alan D. Snow +

  • Ariel Kadouri

  • Bas Couwenberg

  • Ben Beasley

  • Brendan Ward +

  • Casper van der Wel +

  • Ewout ter Hoeven +

  • Geir Arne Hjelle +

  • James Gaboardi

  • James Myatt +

  • Joris Van den Bossche

  • Keith Jenkins +

  • Kian Meng Ang +

  • Krishna Chaitanya +

  • Kyle Barron

  • Martin Fleischmann +

  • Martin Lackner +

  • Mike Taves

  • Phil Chiu +

  • Tanguy Ophoff +

  • Tom Clancy

  • Sean Gillies

  • Giorgos Papadokostakis +

  • Mattijn van Hoek +

  • enrico ferreguti +

  • gpapadok +

  • mattijn +

  • odidev +

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