PyQGIS Documentation - Linfiniti Geo Blog

CHAPTER
ONE
INTRODUCTION
This document is intended to work both as a tutorial and a reference guide. While it does not list all possible use cases,
it should give a good overview of the principal functionality.
Starting from 0.9 release, QGIS has optional scripting support using Python language. We’ve decided for Python as
it’s one of the most favourite languages for scripting. PyQGIS bindings depend on SIP and PyQt4. The reason for
using SIP instead of more widely used SWIG is that the whole QGIS code depends on Qt libraries. Python bindings
for Qt (PyQt) are done also using SIP and this allows seamless integration of PyQGIS with PyQt.
TODO: Getting PyQGIS to work (Manual compilation, Troubleshooting)
There are several ways how to use QGIS python bindings, they are covered in detail in the following sections:
• issue commands in Python console within QGIS
• create and use plugins in Python
• create custom applications based on QGIS API
There is a complete QGIS API reference that documents the classes from the QGIS libraries. Pythonic QGIS API is
nearly identical to the API in C++.
There are some resources about programming with PyQGIS on QGIS blog. See QGIS tutorial ported to Python for
some examples of simple 3rd party apps. A good resource when dealing with plugins is to download some plugins
from plugin repository and examine their code.
1.1 Python Console
For scripting, it is possible to take advantage of integrated Python console. It can be opened from menu: Plugins →
Python Console. The console opens as a non-modal utility window:
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