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.