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Portolan enables organizations to share geospatial data in a low-cost, accessible, sovereign, and reliable way. Built on cloud-native geospatial formats, a Portolan catalog is as interactive as any geospatial portal—but faster, more scalable, and much cheaper to run.

This CLI converts data to cloud-native formats (GeoParquet, COG), generates rich STAC metadata, and syncs to any object storage—no servers required.

Why Portolan?

Benefit	How
Scalable	Cloud object storage that scales to petabytes
Open	100% open source, open formats (GeoParquet, COG)
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