How-To Guides

Concrete, step-by-step solutions for Python GIS tasks — from loading a shapefile to shipping a scheduled, tested, containerised pipeline.

The shape of a how-to guide: the problem, the steps, the code, the explanation and the edge cases. a task end to end, with the decisions namedthe problemthe stepsthe codewhy it worksedge casescopyablethe part that transferswhat breaks itThe last two sections are what separates a guide from a snippet somebody pasted

These guides are built around specific, real-world tasks. Each one starts with a clear problem statement, gives you a quick working answer, and then walks through a complete solution with code you can copy and adapt.

They span the whole arc of a GIS workflow. The everyday operations are here — reading a shapefile, reprojecting, filtering, spatial joins, buffers, choropleths, raster extraction. So is everything that comes after: cleaning messy attributes and geometry, batch-processing whole folders, chunking datasets too large for memory, building configurable pipelines, testing them, containerising them, running them in CI, and driving QGIS itself from Python.

Every guide is self-contained, so you do not need to read them in order. If you would rather follow a route than pick a single task, the learning paths string these guides into ordered routes through a subject.

Browse by topic

The fastest way in. Each topic page gathers these guides alongside the concepts behind them and the errors they cause.

Fundamentals What the objects, files and libraries actually are.
Geometry & space The shapes themselves, where they sit on the earth, and how they relate.
Imagery & point clouds Data that arrives as measurements of a surface rather than as features on it.
Analysis Getting from a raw download to something you can put in front of someone.
Modelling & prediction Predicting values where nobody measured them, and deciding where things should go — with the limits of each model attached.
Production Work that runs without you watching it.
Delivery & sharing Handing the work to someone else: an API, an app, a link that keeps working.
Governance & trust What a dataset is allowed to say, who it is allowed to say it about, and how anyone proves where it came from.
Tools The other software in a Python GIS stack, driven from Python.

See every topic, including the concepts and fixes →

Or follow a learning path Curated routes in the order that builds on itself — concepts first, then each task, then the errors it produces.

Every how-to guide, A–Z

Page 1 — use the page links below, or browse by topic above.

Running into errors?

If something is not working — a CRS mismatch, a batch job that stops on one bad file, a scheduled script that never runs — the fixes section has targeted answers for each of these workflows.

Browse the Fixes 🔧 Follow a Learning Path 📚 Review the Concepts 🧭