share your qgis project: the relocator plugin

Since I developed qgis2leaf together with some great supporters we always struggled with sharing a qgis project: we use different layers, different visualizations and so on. It’s not easy to make sure you’re talking about the same. So why not make it possible to export a whole qgs project with one click…

The relocator plugin

The first steps I designed was to copy raster as well as vector data to a single defined directory. This is straight forward and uses the

QgsVectorFileWriter.writeAsVectorFormat(layer,path,encoding,crs,type)

for vector files distributed over your hard drive(s) and the

shutil.copyfile(src_path, dst_path)

for raster files. The only problem was to change a xml document. Yes, a qgs file is a simple xml document and so I used this nice little how-to from the python documentation:

for rank in root.iter('rank'):
	new_rank = int(rank.text) + 1
	rank.text = str(new_rank)
	rank.set('updated', 'yes')
tree.write('output.xml')

First I copy the old qgs file to the defined directory and then I adjust all the given source paths to the layers:

You will find all your data in the chosen directory along with your qgs file. Furthermore you have the possibility to store this directory in a zip file so it is easy to send the whole set by email or store it on a ftp server. Sharing was never easier:


The plugin can be downloaded and developed via github. It is already pushed to the official plugin repo by qgis but is still flagged as experimental:

Can someone check it on a Windows or Mac? Thank you for any comments and/or issues on github!