portolan-cli 0.1.3

A CLI tool for managing cloud-native geospatial data

Portolan CLI

Cloud-native geospatial data catalogs, simplified

---

A CLI for publishing and managing cloud-native geospatial data catalogs. Portolan orchestrates format conversion (GeoParquet, COG), versioning, and sync to object storage—no running servers, just static files.

Why Portolan?

Benefit	How
Scalable	Cloud object storage that scales to petabytes
Open	100% open source, open formats (GeoParquet, COG, STAC, Iceberg)
AI-Ready	STAC metadata enables semantic search and LLM integration
Cheap	Pay only for storage + egress — no servers to run
Sovereign	Host anywhere (AWS, GCS, Azure, MinIO, Cloudflare R2)
Breaks the GIS silo	Query with DuckDB, Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, Pandas — not just GIS tools

What It Does

• Convert vector/raster data to cloud-native formats (GeoParquet, COG)
• Generate STAC catalogs with rich metadata, thumbnails, and MapLibre styles
• Version datasets with checksums and history tracking
• Sync to S3, GCS, Azure, or any S3-compatible storage

Quick Example

portolan init
portolan dataset add census.parquet --title "Census 2022" --auto
portolan remote add prod s3://my-bucket/catalog
portolan sync

Installation

Recommended: pipx (for global use)

pipx install portolan-cli

This installs portolan in an isolated environment while making the command globally available.

If you don't have pipx installed:

python3 -m pip install --user pipx
python3 -m pipx ensurepath

Alternative: pip

pip install portolan-cli

Note: This installs into your global or user site-packages and may conflict with other packages.

For Development

Use uv for local development:

git clone https://github.com/portolan-sdi/portolan-cli.git
cd portolan-cli
uv sync --all-extras
uv run portolan --help

See Contributing Guide for full development setup.

Documentation

• Contributing Guide
• Architecture
• Roadmap

License

Apache 2.0 — see LICENSE