Plot Route On Google Maps With Python

Introduction

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

You probably use Google Maps a lot in your daily life, such as locate a popular restaurant, check the distance between one place to another, or find the nearest driving route and shortest travelling time etc. If you have been thrown with a big set of location data where you need check and validate them from a map, and then find the optimal routes, you probably would think how this can be done programmatically in Python. In this article, we will be exploring how all these can be achieved with Python Google Maps APIs.

Prerequisites

To be able to use Google Maps APIs, you will need to create a Google Cloud Service account and set up a billing method. If you are a new signed up user, you would get $300 credit for you to try out all the various Google APIs. You can follow the official docs to set up a new project, and from where you would get an API key for using its services.

You will also need to install the GoogleMaps package in your working environment, below is the pip command to install the package:

pip install -U googlemaps

Now let’s import the package at the beginning of our code, and initialize the service with your API Key:

import googlemaps 
gmaps =…