QGIS Plugin
The OrbGIS Connector brings your portal into QGIS: browse your layers, load them into projects, edit live, and publish new datasets back, free and open source.
Requirements and installation#
The Connector needs QGIS 3.34 or newer and nothing else, pure Python, no extra dependencies. It installs from OrbGIS’s own plugin repository:
Add the repository
In QGIS: Plugins → Manage and Install Plugins → Settings → Add…, with the URL
https://app.orbgis.se/plugins/plugins.xml.Install OrbGIS Connector
Find it under All plugins and install. QGIS handles updates automatically from then on. A globe button appears on the toolbar and toggles the OrbGIS dock.
Sign in
Press Sign in in the dock. Your browser opens OrbGIS’s consent page; approve, and the plugin receives its own session, no password typed into QGIS, no API key to paste. The session is stored encrypted in the QGIS auth database.
The dock#
The dock shows your account status, the Layers list, every feature layer in your organization, with geometry type and feature count, and an Add to map button per layer, and an Upload drop zone, with a shared progress bar underneath.
Loading and editing layers#
Add to map downloads the layer into a managed GeoPackage and adds it to your project. From there, edit exactly as you always do in QGIS: toggle editing, change attributes and geometries, add and delete features. Save Edits pushes your changes back to OrbGIS, deletes, updates, then inserts, each batch applied atomically with automatic retries on network blips. When you finish editing a large layer, the plugin queues an overview refresh so zoomed-out tiles catch up within a few minutes.
How concurrent editing works#
Editing is lockless: nobody checks a layer out, and the last write wins. If two people update the same feature, the later save takes effect; colliding inserts fail loudly rather than silently. If the plugin detects a definite rejection it flips the layer to an out-of-sync state and stops pushing until you re-add it fresh, your local copy is never silently mangled.
Schema changes (adding or removing fields) are not synced, a hosted layer’s schema is fixed at upload. Making one in QGIS flips the layer out of sync; upload it as a new layer if you need the new schema.
Publishing from QGIS#
Drag any vector layer from the QGIS Layers panel onto the dock’s Upload zone. The plugin exports it and runs the standard ingest pipeline; it appears in your portal as a new hosted layer, ready to style and map.
The plugin talks only to your OrbGIS portal’s API, it never connects to the database directly, and signing out of the plugin doesn’t touch your browser session.