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.

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.