Spatialite is a handy way to create/store spatial data inside a sqlite database. If none of those words make much sense, I recommend reading up a bit more on sqlite and spatialite before proceeding. The following instructions worked for me on macOS Mojave, v10.14 via a MacBook Pro from early 2015. If folks get this working on different/older versions, let me know.
Getting spatialite on a mac isn't totally straightforward at this point, so the easiest option I found was via homebrew. Homebrew is a handy tool for many things, so it's worth grabbing and installing. The easiest option is via homebrew. So head over to the hombrew webpage, copy the long line of code at the top of the page and paste it into a Terminal window, and hit return:
- Run this line:
/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
You'll likely see something like this:
Go ahead and hit return. If you haven't used brew before, this may take a few minutes to install...go grab a cup of coffee. One additional step that you may need to do is open XCode and accept the license after it's all done.
Next we want to install the "engine" that allows us to make/use spatial databases via SQLite. Again, we can use homebrew here. The nice thing is the code gets easier as we go forward. To install/update/upgrade packages in homebrew, we use brew with the command we want to do, then the package we're interested in. So, for spatialite:
brew install spatialite-tools
Again, you'll likely need to wait a few minutes. Once all the code is flying by and assuming you didn't have any errors, you can double check it installed with:
brew info spatialite-tools
Depending on your computer, you may need to install gdal as well, (brew install gdal).
One final step, that isn't necessarily required but may be helpful if you aren't interested in dealing with command-line and spatialite. There are number open source spatial tools along with [QGIS](brew install saga-gis-lts) (recent install instructions using homebrew here), but one that might be particularly useful for spatialite and sqlite databases is something called spatialite-gui.
The easiest way to get it running on OSX is via Homebrew:
brew install spatialite-gui
Having installed SpatiaLite, we can create/modify spatiallite databases, import shapefiles, all in a tidy SQLite database.
Let's use a database used for a workshop taught by Michele Tobias. To download in the Terminal, we want to change directory (cd) to the place we'll want to save/work with our data (e.g, cd ~Downloads. Then use wget:
wget https://github.com/MicheleTobias/Spatial_SQL/raw/master/sfbay.sqlite
To open the gui, in your Terminal, type spatialite_gui. This should open a new gui which allows you to create/interact with a spatialite database.