Users want something like this. Myself, I have a hard time getting over how terrible the GDALBuildVRT API is. It's got a score of optional arguments that are passed as key=value strings. We get all the downsides of a strongly typed language, but without the upsides. These arguments can't be type-checked at compile time. Trying to use GDALWarp was no fun.

I second this. It'd be extremely useful.

@gboeing can you say more? How would you use it? What are you doing now as a workaround? Generating XML using Python? Calling gdalbuildvrt in a subprocess?

@sgillies a common use case for OSMnx would be something like taking a bunch of SRTM elevation rasters, building a VRT, then attaching elevation to street network nodes. Currently OSMnx uses GDAL to build VRTs here. That means that this module imports both rasterio and osgeo.gdal. As far as I can tell, this is a no-no. From the rasterio docs:

Rasterio and GDAL’s bindings can contend for global GDAL objects. Unless you have deep knowledge about both packages, choose exactly one of import osgeo.gdal or import rasterio.

GDAL’s bindings (gdal for the rest of this document) and Rasterio are not entirely compatible and should not, without a great deal of care, be imported and used in a single Python program.

However, it works so far. But this seems pretty suboptimal. It would be wonderful if rasterio had a BuildVRT equivalent so we could exclusively use rasterio.

I have a draft implementation in #2698 I have been working on.

This would also be useful for #2696 & #2682

UPDATE: After further inspection, that is not the case. They must have the same CRS.

I have a draft implementation in #2698 I have been working on.

@snowman2 this looks great!

@gboeing thank you, I read the osmnx code and see what it's doing. I left some comments on #2698 for @snowman2.

With #2698, @gboeing could change the code from:

gdal.BuildVRT(filepath, filepaths).FlushCache()

to this:

import rasterio
import rasterio.shutil

with rasterio.open(filepaths) as vrt:
    rasterio.shutil.copy(vrt, filepath)

Thanks all. Yes this proposed solution looks like it would be straightforward enough.

Alternate solution in #2699.

Related: #2498