qgpkg uses the OGC GeoPackage specification to store QGIS mapping information in a GeoPackage database file.
The OGC geopackage format was designed with the goal of being interoperable across a range of environments, in particular mobile devices operating in offline and near offline scenarios.
This plugin introduces two approaches for storing mapping projects, encoded in two different geopackage extensions: the QGIS extension and the OWS context extension.
The goal of the qgis geopackage extension is to enable users to share their QGIS projects, including style and resources.
This extension stores a QGIS project file in one of the extension tables, which works for the described use case, but does not allow interoperability with other GIS software.
The ows geopackage extension was designed With the specific goal of enabling interoperability with other GIS sofwtare, being completely based on OGC standards.
The idea is to store styling using OGC:SLD, and the project context using OGC:OWS_Context, so that other software can encode/decode this information.
In both extensions, data, resources and style are packed along with project information (e.g.: layer order or visibility, bounding box), enabling a self-contained, portable mapping project.
The QGIS plugin adds three buttons to the QGIS GUI. One for saving the current
project in a GeoPackage file, another one for loading a QGIS project from a
GeoPackage file, and a third one to display an about dialog.
Support is given for loading multiple layers and styles from the geopackage. In the examples folder you may find examples of
geopackages using the qgis and ows extensions. The screenshot bellow refers to multiple_layers.gpkg:
Although the user can read from either extension, using a detection mechanism, currently the writing operation is only supported for the qgis extension.
If you are interested in writing geopackages using the ows extension, please have a look at ArCGIS GeoCat Bridge.
In addition, gpkg is implemented as a Python library with a command line interface.
Commands:
usage: qgpkg.py [-h] {info,write,read} ...
Store QGIS map information in GeoPackages
optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
commands:
valid commands
{info,write,read}
info GeoPackage content information
write Save QGIS project in GeoPackage
read Read QGIS project from GeoPackage
Please note that the cli supports only for the qgis extension.
This plugin was first implemented by Cédric Christen and Pirmin Kalberer (Sourcepole) using the qgis_extension approach.
Later it was forked by Joana Simoes and Paul van Genuchten (GeoCat), who added support to the ows_extension.
The fork was merged into the master branch, to create this version: a plugin which enables users to read projects using either geopackage extension.
Support to writing in both extensions, is also envisioned for the near future.
This plugin requires QGIS >= 2.18, compiled using Qt4 and PyQt4.
As the plugin reads geopackages generated by ArcGIS GeoCat Bridge, which uses a recent gdal version,
in order to be able to open those files you need to compile QGIS with gdal >=2.0.
Unfortunately, in the ubuntu/linux public repositories, there are no QGIS packages compiled against gdal2. However if you are on OS X, you can use the package compiled by King Chaos.
git clone https://github.com/pka/qgpkg
You are welcome to report any issues using the github track.
This project is released under an MIT license. Please refer to License.txt for more details.