A Python library for reading, writing and manipulating KML files.

Introduction

KML is an XML geospatial data format and an OGC standard that deserves a canonical python implementation.

Fastkml is a library to read, write and manipulate KML files. It aims to keep it simple and fast (using lxml if available). Fast refers to the time you spend to write and read KML files as well as the time you spend to get acquainted to the library or to create KML objects. It aims to provide all of the functionality that KML clients such as Marble, NASA WorldWind, Cesium JS, OpenLayers, Google Maps, and Google Earth support.

For more details about the KML Specification, check out the KML Reference on the Google developers site.

Features

• Simple and fast: Easy-to-use API with fast performance
• Geometry support: Handles geometries as pygeoif objects, compatible with any geometry that implements the __geo_interface__ protocol, such as shapely
• Cross-platform compatibility: Tested on CPython, PyPy and GraalPy
• Python 3.10+: Works on alternative Python implementations that support Python >=3.10

Status

Quality Assurance:

Package Information:

Documentation & Community:

Installation

Basic Installation

Add FastKML to your project by installing it from PyPI. You can install it using uv, pip, or conda.

uv add fastkml

This will install FastKML with all required dependencies.

With Optional Dependencies

For enhanced performance, install with lxml:

uv add "fastkml[lxml]"

Using pip

pip install fastkml

Using Conda

You can also install FastKML using conda-forge:

conda install -c conda-forge fastkml

Requirements

Required Dependencies

• pygeoif - For geometry handling
• arrow - For date and time processing

Optional Dependencies

• lxml - For improved XML parsing performance (recommended)

Documentation

You can find all of the documentation for FastKML at fastkml.readthedocs.org. If you find something that is missing, please submit a pull request on GitHub with the improvement.

Limitations

FastKML does not model every element of the KML specification -- for example xal:AddressDetails and the <kml> root's arbitrary hint attribute are not currently supported.

Please submit a PR with the features you'd like to see implemented.

Contributing

We welcome contributions! Please check out our contributing guide for guidelines on how to contribute.