May 15, 2021


python spatialite sqlite icu

This is the yak shaving edition of getting things to work instead of doing work with things. My least favorite activity.

Python and ICU

I’m trying to use csvkit and numpy for some tinkering. But getting them installed on my Mac was giving me fits because one of the core dependencies, ICU (Internal Components for Unicode), just would link properly.

I know that this is all related to the use of Homebrew to install libraries and dependencies, and then ensuring that various setup.py scripts and can find the correct versions. But it was really escaping me how to fix it.

After a lot of trial and error and landed on this recipe. The first two steps of that absolutely fixed my frustrations: libicu-dev and PyICU are now happily installed, which paved the way for a flawless pip3 install csvkit. Whew!

Spatialite and Python

Spatialite is a loadable extension to SQLite that adds geospatial capabilities to my favorite relational database. I want to use that for some experimental work with tax data. But the version of SQLite that gets installed by default on a Mac does not support the ostensibly insecure capability to load extensions at runtime. So when trying to install Python…which depends

Bottom line: I needed to get a version of Python installed that was pointing to a version of SQLite that could use loadable extensions, so that my end goal of using Spatialite as a dependency in Datasette could be satisfied. Still following?!

Anyway, I ultimately found the solution and with a tiny bit of tweaking I was all set. I use asdf for managing my Python versions, and it using pyenv, so the recipe worked well:

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PYTHON_CONFIGURE_OPTS="--enable-loadable-sqlite-extensions --enable-optimizations --with-openssl=\$(brew --prefix openssl)" \
LDFLAGS="-L/usr/local/opt/sqlite/lib" \
CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/local/opt/sqlite/include" \
asdf install python 3.9.5

The --with-openssl=$(brew --prefix openssl) bit didn’t work for me. Typing that bit on the command line gave expected results:

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$ brew --prefix openssl
/usr/local/opt/openssl@1.1

So I just dropped that value into the --with-openssl parameter. With that in place, the installation of Python went great, and then trying to run datasette --spatial-lite my.db finally, finally worked.

See Also