Learn QGIS - Fourth Edition

Developing your first plugin

If you want to implement interactive tools or very specific graphical user interfaces, you will need to build a plugin. In the previous exercises, we introduced the QGIS Python API. Now we will focus on the necessary steps to get our first QGIS plugin built. The great thing about creating plugins for QGIS is that there is a plugin called Plugin Builder. Plugin Builder allows you to build the framework for a plugin. Also ensure that you install Plugin Reloader, since this is very useful for plugin development. It lets you reload your plugin without restarting QGIS every time you make changes to the code. When you have installed both plugins, your Plugins toolbar will look similar to this:

The plugin reloader