Django APP to automate GeoDjango shapefile importations and management without affecting migrations
GeoDjango includes a helper function to import ESRI shapefiles to PostGIS enabled DB: LayerMapping
It works as intended but it’s still a boring process. Moreover, the usual importing procedure means creating new migrations for each imported shapefile. This is problably OK for sparse importings of a couple of shapefiles. But as I needed to manage many shapefiles and/or keep adding/deleting them it doesn’t sounded to me very sane to keep afecting migration files (and migration history).
This APP proposes an alternative to manage such shapefiles:
Clone this repo:
git clone https://github.com/Rodrigo-NH/django-shapefileimport
Or install with pip/pipenv (e.g. ‘pipenv install django-shapefileimport’) PiPy package
Enter the ‘django-shapefileimport’ directory, install de dependencies, enter shell and start a new project (For simplicity I reccomend keeping the ending dot at the django-admin startproject command, it makes project folder to be created at same level as the APP [not nested])
pipenv install
pipenv shell
django-admin startproject mysite .
edit ‘./mysite/settings.py’ and add to INSTALLED_APPS:
'django.contrib.gis',
'shapefileimport'
Still at ‘./mysite/settings.py’, configure the database connection:
DATABASES = {
'default': {
'ENGINE': 'django.contrib.gis.db.backends.postgis',
'NAME': 'shapeimportsDB',
'USER': 'geo',
'HOST': '192.168.0.40',
'PORT': '5432',
'PASSWORD': 'dbpassword',
},
}
Run migrations, create superuser and start the APP:
python manage.py makemigrations
python manage.py migrate
python manage.py createsuperuser
python manage.py runserver
It must be done at this point. Enter admin panel and start importing your shapefiles.
After importing, use ‘loadShape()’ function to load the shapefile and use. Example:
from shapefileimport.shapetasks import loadShape
from django.core.serializers import serialize
ds = loadShape('MyShapeName')
ff = serialize('geojson', ds.objects.all(), geometry_field='geom',)