QGIS is a free, open source, cross platform (lin/win/mac) geographical information system (GIS)
QGIS is a full-featured, user-friendly, free-and-open-source (FOSS) geographical information system (GIS) that runs on Unix platforms, Windows, and MacOS.
Example: Temporal animation
Example: 3D map view
For more maps created with QGIS, visit the QGIS Map Showcase Flickr Group.
Example: Travel isochrones
Example: Model designer
Powerful customization and extensibility
Example: Style manager
Example: Plugins
QGIS Server
Headless map server -- running on Linux, macOS, Windows, or in a docker container -- that shares the same code base as QGIS.
Example: QGIS server WMS response
Example: QGIS server WFS response
Under the hood
QGIS is developed using the Qt toolkit and C++, since 2002, and has a pleasing, easy to use graphical user interface with multilingual support. It is maintained by an active developer team and supported by vibrant community of GIS professionals and enthusiasts as well as geospatial data publishers and end-users.
Versions and release cycle
QGIS development and releases follow a time based schedule/roadmap. There are three main branches of QGIS that users can install. These are the Long Term Release (LTR) branch, the Latest Release (LR) branch, and the Development (Nightly) branch.
Every month, there is a Point Release that provides bug-fixes to the LTR and LR.
Free and Open Source
QGIS is released under the GNU Public License (GPL) Version 2 or any later version. Developing QGIS under this license means that you can (if you want to) inspect and modify the source code and guarantees that you, our happy user will always have access to a GIS program that is free of cost and can be freely modified.
QGIS is part of the Open-Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo), offering a range of complementary open-source GIS software projects.
Installing and using QGIS
Precompiled binaries for QGIS are available at the QGIS.org download page. Please follow the installation instructions carefully.
The building guide can be used to get started with building QGIS from source.
For installation of QGIS Server, see its getting started documentation.
Documentation
A range of documentation is available. This includes:
Help and support channels
There are several channels where you can find help and support for QGIS:
You can help us by submitting bug reports or fixing bugs in the QGIS bug tracker.
New features and enhancements
If you wish to contribute patches you can:
The development team can then review your contribution and commit it upstream as appropriate.
If you commit a new feature, add [FEATURE]
to your commit message AND give a clear description of the new feature. The label Needs documentation
will be added by maintainers and will automatically create an issue on the QGIS-Documentation repo, where you or others should write documentation about it.
For large-scale changes, you can open a QEP (QGIS Enhancement Proposal). QEPs are used in the process of creating and discussing new enhancements or policy for QGIS.
Translations
Please help translate QGIS to your language. At this moment about forty languages are already available in the Desktop user interface and about eighty languages are available in transifex ready to be translated.
The translation process is managed by the Translation Team and all the activities are done under the Transifex platform.
Other ways to contribute
If you are not a developer, there are many other possibilities that do not require programming skills to help QGIS to evolve. Check our project homepage for more information.
Twice a month we will interview people behind open source businesses. We will talk about how they are building a business on top of open source projects.
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