GTFSVTOR

An open-source GTFS validator, released under GPLv3. See the LICENSE file for more information.

Online public validator

New! A free online validator is hosted here: https://gtfsvtor.mecatran.com/.

Features and project goals

• Fast
• Memory-efficient, ability to process very large GTFS
• Extensible, code easy to read and maintain
• Extensive coverage of validation
• Backward-compatible with the historical "python" validator
• Various outputs (json, html...)

How to use GTFSVTOR

GTFSVTOR is in a workable state.

As the time of writing, all the tables and fields from the GTFS specifications are loaded.

Almost all validation rules of the legacy feedvalidator.py are implemented. See the list of issues in github to check the few missing rules. Other (new or refined) rules have also been added, aiming for backward-compatibility when possible. The most notable backward-incompability is the taking into account of exact shapes in computing too fast travels; however this change in behavior increase the accuracy and reliability of too fast travels validation.

You can browse this HTML example report to see the validation result of the "verybad" dataset. Also see this JSON example report summary.

To use it:

• Download the latest release (available in the project github)
• Unzip the file somewhere
• Run gtfsvtor:

    ./gtfsvtor/bin/gtfsvtor --help
    ./gtfsvtor/bin/gtfsvtor [options] <GTFS file>

On Windows, use the provided gtfsvtor.bat file instead.

Please note that a Java JRE is required to run the application.

A sample config.properties file is included in the root of the project if you want to configure the validation (see Configuration section below).

For large GTFS, you can increase the default JVM heap size by setting the appropriate JVM options in the GTFSVTOR_OPTS variable:

GTFSVTOR_OPTS=-Xmx6G ./gtfsvtor/bin/gtfsvtor <GTFS file>

Also, unzipping data on disk can reduce memory usage for large GTFS.

Performances

Performance tests are done using:

• in-memory option (-m) enabled for feedvalidator.py

• duplicate trips detection option (-d) disabled for feedvalidator.py

• small memory-footprint GtfsStopTime implementation enabled for GTFSVTOR

• multi-threading validation enabled (--numThreads 8) for GTFSVTOR

  GTFS	Routes	Stops	Trips	Times	Shp pts	FeedValidator	GTFSVTOR
  MBTA Boston	236	9861	70446	1829k	323k	2m20s	8s
  Montréal	229	9241	206069	7814k	199k	9m23s	20s
  IDFM Paris	1870	63471	467457	10564k	-	57m50s	40s
  OV Netherlands	2703	63995	787736	16103k	3384k	?	1m50s
  DELFI Germany	20656	565016	2161712	41971k	8322k	?	2m44s

Note: Performances comparisons should be fairly accurate now, as GTFSVTOR do have all CPU-intensive validators implemented (loading and conversion of stops, trips, times, shapes, calendars; shape linear indexing; calendar indexing; stop spatial indexing; too fast travel checks, trip duplication detection, block ID overlap...). Also GTFSVTOR has trip duplication detection enabled, whereas feedvalidator.py does not.

Docker

Run a dockerized GTFSVTOR using the laurentgregoire/gtfsvtor Docker image:

docker run --rm -i -v <path_data_directory, e.g. $(PWD)>:/data -e TZ=Europe/Berlin laurentgregoire/gtfsvtor /data/<gtfs-file>

GTFSVTOR is executed in the mounted /data dir. If you'd like to use a custom config.properties, you may place it besides the gtfs file and supply -c config.properties as additional parameters. Note that the timezone must be specified explicitly (via -e TZ=<your timezone>) to have correct timestamps reported in the validation-results.html.

Configuration

You can configure GTFSVTOR by editing a config file in the project root folder. You should specify which config file to load by using the --config command-line option. See the provided config.properties example.

You can disable a validator (or enable a validator disabled by default) by writing:

validator.SomeValidator.enabled = true
validator.SomeOtherValidator.enabled = false

When SomeValidator is the class name of the validator to enable/disable.

Use the --listValidators command-line option to list all validators and their options.

To configure a validator option, write for example:

validator.CalendarValidator.expiredCutoffDate = 2020/12/31

This example will configure the feed expiry cutoff date to the specified date (for information by default the default expiry date is "today").

Bug tracking

If you experience a bug, please create a ticket in the issue page of the GTFSVTOR github project here.

Please follow standard best-practices by providing:

• A short summary of the bug
• What is wrong
• What is expected
• The version of GTFSVTOR used
• The options used (command-line options if any, config file if any)
• A (minimal) example of (GTFS) data that experience the behavior (or a link to this data)
• If relevant to the bug, your environment (JVM & OS type and version...)

Create a distinct issue per different bug.

Developer guide

TODO

• Code documentation
• Adding new validation rules
• Using GTFSVTOR as a library