Cannot find spatialite on arm64 linux

[MikeCoats]

Initially, I found an issue in datasette where it wouldn’t find spatialite when running on my Radxa Rock 5B - an RK3588 powered SBC, running the arm64 build of Debian Bullseye. I confirmed the same behaviour on my Raspberry Pi 4 - a BCM2711 powered SBC, running the arm64 build of Debian Bookworm.

$ datasette --load-extension=spatialite example.db
Error: Could not find SpatiaLite extension

I did some digging and realised the issue originates in this project. Even with the libsqlite3-mod-spatialite package installed, pytest skips all of the GIS tests in the project.

$ apt list --installed | grep spatial
[…]
libsqlite3-mod-spatialite/stable,now 5.0.1-3 arm64 [installed]

$ ls -l /usr/lib/*/*spatial*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root      23 Dec  1  2022 /usr/lib/aarch64-linux-gnu/mod_spatialite.so -> mod_spatialite.so.7.1.0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root      23 Dec  1  2022 /usr/lib/aarch64-linux-gnu/mod_spatialite.so.7 -> mod_spatialite.so.7.1.0
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 7348584 Dec  1  2022 /usr/lib/aarch64-linux-gnu/mod_spatialite.so.7.1.0

$ pytest
tests/test_get.py ......                                                 [ 73%]
tests/test_gis.py ssssssssssss                                           [ 75%]
tests/test_hypothesis.py ....                                            [ 75%]

I tracked the issue down to the find_sqlite() function in the utils.py file. The SPATIALITE_PATHS array doesn’t have an entry for the location of this module on arm64 linux.

[simonw]

See details of how I tested this here:

• https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-utils/pull/600#issuecomment-1793268126

Short version: having applied this fix, the following command (on simulated aarch64):

sqlite-utils memory "select spatialite_version()" --load-extension=spatialite

Outputs:

[{"spatialite_version()": "5.0.1"}]