Introduction

The feedvalidator is a command line tool that checks a Google Transit Feed for problems and generates a HTML report. Running it on your transit data feed and fixing the issues that it finds can save you from display and routing problems down the road.

For a list of the errors and warnings that FeedValidator outputs, see the FeedValidatorErrorsAndWarnings page.

You may run the validator on an uncompressed directory of GTFS txt files. I recommend you validate your final google_transit.zip just before publishing it to catch any mistakes creating the zip. If you have an script that generates your GTFS file consider making validation a final step and aborting if it exits with an error.

Windows standalone version

We provide a Windows executable version for convenience; if you're running Windows, you should use this one. To get it, download the latest transitfeed-(version)-windows.zip from the project download page.

Once you have it downloaded and unzipped, there are a few ways to run it:

Easiest

Drag a feed zip file or directory onto feedvalidator.exe. A window will pop up with the result of the validation test:

Intermediate

Double-click feedvalidator.exe. A window will pop up and ask you to enter the location of your feed file or directory. You can type it in, or just drag a feed file or directory onto the window and hit Enter.

Expert

Go to the Windows command prompt, and type: feedvalidator <name of feed file or directory>. If you want to avoid the prompt at the end of the validation, use the --noprompt parameter.

Python source code version

Use this version if you're on Mac OS X or Linux.

Before you run the feed validator you must install Python 2.4 or 2.5. You can download it from http://www.python.org/download/

Fetch the feedvalidator from our source code repository (see Source tab above) or by directly downloading http://googletransitdatafeed.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/python/feedvalidator.py and http://googletransitdatafeed.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/python/transitfeed.py to the same directory.

Running

Run the feed validator as

feedvalidator.py <feed filename>

The warning "Timezone not checked (install pytz package for timezone validation)" is normal. feedvalidator can not check the spelling of the agency_timezone until you install the pytz package.

Extra help for Windows XP/2000 users

Open a new Command Prompt window. Change into the directory containing feedvalidator.py and transitfeed.py (Hint: type "cd " without quotes and drag the icon of the folder into command prompt window). Run feedvalidator.py <feed filename>. If you don't want to type the feed filename try dragging it into the command prompt window.

Revision History

See the TransitFeedDistribution page.