Explode MultiPolygon geometry into individual Polygon geometries in a shapefile using GeoPandas and Shapely

explode.py

import geopandas as gpd
from shapely.geometry.polygon import Polygon
from shapely.geometry.multipolygon import MultiPolygon

def explode(indata):
    indf = gpd.GeoDataFrame.from_file(indata)
    outdf = gpd.GeoDataFrame(columns=indf.columns)
    for idx, row in indf.iterrows():
        if type(row.geometry) == Polygon:
            outdf = outdf.append(row,ignore_index=True)
        if type(row.geometry) == MultiPolygon:
            multdf = gpd.GeoDataFrame(columns=indf.columns)
            recs = len(row.geometry)
            multdf = multdf.append([row]*recs,ignore_index=True)
            for geom in range(recs):
                multdf.loc[geom,'geometry'] = row.geometry[geom]
            outdf = outdf.append(multdf,ignore_index=True)
    outdf = outdf.set_geometry('geometry')
    return outdf

In case others find their way here, geopandas has this feature built in now:

https://www.pydoc.io/pypi/geopandas-0.4.0/autoapi/geodataframe/index.html#geodataframe.GeoDataFrame.explode