Activate GDAL runtime for current R session — activate_gdal

Prepends runtime paths, sets GDAL/PROJ env vars, and preloads GDAL DLL.

Usage

activate_gdal_runtime(
  gdal_home = default_gdal_home(),
  preload = TRUE,
  quiet = FALSE
)

Arguments

gdal_home: GDAL home directory.
preload: Whether to preload libgdal-*.dll.
quiet: Suppress informational CLI output.

Value

Invisibly returns a list with configured paths.

Details

When the runtime bundle contains a python/ directory (pure-python osgeo_utils package from GDAL's gdal-utils distribution), it is prepended to PYTHONPATH so GDAL algorithms that embed Python at runtime (e.g. gdal driver gpkg validate) can import it. This is session-scoped and does not modify machine or user environment variables.

When preload = TRUE and the GDAL DLL cannot be loaded (most commonly because a dependency DLL is missing), activation fails with an error rather than deferring the failure to library(gdalraster), where the Windows loader reports only a generic "module could not be found".