Simple Features for R

A package that provides simple features access for R. Package sf:

represents simple features as records in a data.frame or tibble with a geometry list-column
represents natively in R all 17 simple feature types for all dimensions (XY, XYZ, XYM, XYZM)
interfaces to GEOS to support geometrical operations including the DE9-IM
interfaces to GDAL, supporting all driver options, Date and POSIXct and list-columns
interfaces to PRØJ for coordinate reference system conversions and transformations
uses well-known-binary serialisations written in C++/Rcpp for fast I/O with GDAL and GEOS
reads from and writes to spatial databases such as PostGIS using DBI
is extended by pkg lwgeom for further liblwgeom/PostGIS functions, including some spherical geometry functions

(Illustration (c) by Allison Horst)

Blogs, presentations, vignettes, sp-sf wiki

an open access R Journal article summarizes the package
package vignettes: first, second, third, forth, fifth, sixth
blog posts: first, second, third, fourth
the original R Consortium ISC proposal, the R Consortium blog post
presentations: rstudio::conf 2018 (video), UseR! 2016
wiki page describing sp-sf migration

Cheatsheet

CC 4.0 BY Ryan Garnett

Installing

Install either from CRAN with:

install.packages("sf")

this will install binary packages on Windows and MacOS, unless you configured R such that it tries to install source packages; in that case, see below.

Install development versions from github with

library(devtools)
install_github("r-spatial/sf")

Windows

Installing sf from source works under windows when Rtools is installed. This downloads the system requirements from rwinlib.

MacOS

The easiest way to install gdal is using Homebrew. Recent version of homebrew include a full-featured up-to-date gdal formula:

brew install pkg-config
brew install gdal

Once gdal is installed, you will be able to install sf package from source in R.

Alternatively these instructions explain how to install gdal using kyngchaos frameworks.

Linux

For Unix-alikes, GDAL (>= 2.0.1), GEOS (>= 3.4.0) and Proj.4 (>= 4.8.0) are required.

Ubuntu

Dependencies for recent (non-LTS, later than bionic) versions of Ubuntu are available in the official repositories; install them with

sudo apt-get install libudunits2-dev libgdal-dev libgeos-dev libproj-dev

To install the dependencies on LTS versions of Ubuntu (xenial, bionic), either add ubuntugis-unstable to the package repositories and use:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntugis/ubuntugis-unstable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libudunits2-dev libgdal-dev libgeos-dev libproj-dev

or install dependencies from source; see e.g. an older travis config file for hints.

Fedora

The following command installs all required dependencies:

sudo dnf install gdal-devel proj-devel proj-epsg proj-nad geos-devel udunits2-devel

Arch

Get gdal, proj and geos from the main repos and udunits from the AUR:

pacman -S gdal proj geos
pacaur/yaourt/whatever -S udunits

Other

To install on Debian, the rocker geospatial Dockerfiles may be helpful. Ubuntu Dockerfiles are found here.

Multiple GDAL, GEOS and/or PROJ versions on your system

In case you use dynamic linking (installation from source) and have multiple versions of these libraries installed (e.g. one from ubuntugis-unstable, another installed from source in /usr/local/lib) then this will in general not work, even when setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH manually. See here for the reason why.

lwgeom

Functions and methods that require liblwgeom, including st_make_valid and all spherical or ellipsoidal metrics (area, distances), have since sf 0.5-5 been moved to their own package, lwgeom, which is also on CRAN.

Contributing

Contributions of all sorts are most welcome, issues and pull requests are the preferred ways of sharing them.
When contributing pull requests, please adhere to the package style (in package code use = rather than <-; don’t change indentation; tab stops of 4 spaces are preferred)
This project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By participating in this project you agree to abide by its terms.