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[Unoffocial] City of Richmond GIS PostGIS instructions

The best way to load your database is directly from the shapefiles themselves (available via the Richmond GIS office FTP site).

Steps

  1. Download the data
  2. Create your PostGIS database
  3. Extract the shapefiles
  4. Generate SQL for shapefiles
  5. Load data into the database

Downloading the data

Refer to the GIS office FTP link above.

Software requirements

First ensure that you have PostgreSQL and PosGIS installed. On a Mac the simplest way to do this is install the latest version of Postgres.app which is a bundled version of PostgreSQL 9.3 with PostGIS 2.0. On Windows you should be able to use the binary installers for PostgreSQL and PostGIS. If you're on Linux then you should be able to use your native package manager just fine (e.g. apt-get install postgresql postgis).

Database

The scripts herein and elsewhere in the project refer to a database called "richmond" so let's create a matching database. Assuming your system user account has the right privileges, run the following commands from your command prompt:

psql -c "CREATE DATABASE richmond;"
psql -d richmond -c "CREATE EXTENSION IF NOT EXISTS postgis WITH SCHEMA public;"

Now you should have a PostGIS ready database.

Why name it 'richmond' when it is just geographic data? Because this database should later include other data, for which the GIS data will provide a useful foundation for further analysis.

Extraction

Unzip the files...

The included shell scripts 'sqlgen.sh' and 'load.sh' can be used to genearate the SQL for loading the data and loading the data, respectively. The need to be copied to the directory where your shapefiles reside (sorry) and executed from there.

./sqlgen.sh
./load.sh

Again, loading the data with the script as-is requires that your system user account has the requisite database privileges.

Problems and caveats

This is an effort to codify what I did on intially getting the data. I may have inadvertently skipped or changed a step, so if there are any problems let me know (ben@wellfire.co).