Save to GitHub from QGIS

Question

I was wondering if there is a way, or plugin, to save files (i.e. geojson, kml, shp, etc.) from QGIS directly into GitHub.

I know you can save it locally to a hard drive and copy it over, but I am looking for a way to save directly into a GitHub account.

Steven Kay · Accepted Answer

I wouldn’t use Git/GitHub to store GIS-type files for a couple of reasons

Git isn’t designed for large binary files (e.g. images), it's more optimised for text (source code or documentation). Your repos can explode in size if you store images or large binary files in there. There are various variants of Git which attempt to address this, but this is the case for standard Git.
GitHub has a 50Mb/file per file limit last time I checked, and a 1Gb repo limit (with the free account at least, maybe more with a paid plan). Same goes for BitBucket.

Having said that, Git could be useful for keeping some aspects of your projects under source-code control

QGIS project file
notes and documentation
any code you write, of course :)

I just wouldn’t recommend dumping your shape files, GeoTIFFs and the like in there. Unless they’re really small and unlikely to change ;-)

Something like DropBox, Google Drive, or an Amazon S3 bucket might be a better bet, at least for data files.

lynxlynxlynx · Answer

Short answer: not possible.

Looking at the plugin repository, nothing matches git or scm. Versioning finds pgversion, but that's only for postgres and local. So it doesn't appear to be possible out of the box.

On linux systems you can configure network services in greater detail, which means you could potentially just Save/Save as into a repository, but to use eg. sftp for github, you'd still need an intermediary online service. At that point it becomes obvious that it's easier to just write a script to monitor your local target repository folder for changes, commit and push them in a steady interval.

atxgis · Answer

I doubt its possible through a QGIS plugin, but I think you can do it if you save & commit your GIS files into a local repository and then push to your remote github repository.

Save to GitHub from QGIS

3 Answers

Add your own answers!

Ask a Question