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I was wondering if there is a way, or plugin, to save files (i.e. geojson, kml, shp, etc.) from QGIS directly into GitHub.

I know you can save it locally to a hard drive and copy it over, but I am looking for a way to save directly into a GitHub account.

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  • What do you mean with saving "into Github"? Usually you have a repository with files and you usually want to version them. That's why you use git (right?). Otherwise you could simply use Dropbox(or something similar) ...
    – coding_bird
    Commented Sep 21, 2017 at 14:17
  • For me the easiest way would be to push the files to GitHub using the command line. But it usually takes some time to learn. However, you could try a GUI like GitHub Desktop.
    – coding_bird
    Commented Sep 21, 2017 at 14:21
  • Great comments. The rational behind this is looking at moving over to a Chromebook, and using GitHub as a storage/visualization platform. Saving to a location like Drive/Dropbox is good, but was hoping it could be saved directly to GitHub.
    – Ryan Garnett
    Commented Sep 21, 2017 at 14:34
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    How about geogig geogig.org/workshop/workshop.html?
    – user30184
    Commented Sep 21, 2017 at 15:03
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    @coding_bird I have looked at a cloud PostGIS instance. I am looking at using RollApp, which is a cloud instance that has QGIS installed. My hope is to not have to install Linux and just use Chrome natively. GitHub has a ~25MB file limitation, so I have to keep that in mind. Drive/Dropbox may be the way to go
    – Ryan Garnett
    Commented Sep 21, 2017 at 20:11

3 Answers 3

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I wouldn’t use Git/GitHub to store GIS-type files for a couple of reasons

  • Git isn’t designed for large binary files (e.g. images), it's more optimised for text (source code or documentation). Your repos can explode in size if you store images or large binary files in there. There are various variants of Git which attempt to address this, but this is the case for standard Git.

  • GitHub has a 50Mb/file per file limit last time I checked, and a 1Gb repo limit (with the free account at least, maybe more with a paid plan). Same goes for BitBucket.

Having said that, Git could be useful for keeping some aspects of your projects under source-code control

  • QGIS project file
  • notes and documentation
  • any code you write, of course :)

I just wouldn’t recommend dumping your shape files, GeoTIFFs and the like in there. Unless they’re really small and unlikely to change ;-)

Something like DropBox, Google Drive, or an Amazon S3 bucket might be a better bet, at least for data files.

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  • github uses the large-file extension (LFS) to git, so large blobs aren't problematic. At least until you reach the total size limits.
    – lynxlynxlynx
    Commented Sep 21, 2017 at 16:25
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Short answer: not possible.

Looking at the plugin repository, nothing matches git or scm. Versioning finds pgversion, but that's only for postgres and local. So it doesn't appear to be possible out of the box.

On linux systems you can configure network services in greater detail, which means you could potentially just Save/Save as into a repository, but to use eg. sftp for github, you'd still need an intermediary online service. At that point it becomes obvious that it's easier to just write a script to monitor your local target repository folder for changes, commit and push them in a steady interval.

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I doubt its possible through a QGIS plugin, but I think you can do it if you save & commit your GIS files into a local repository and then push to your remote github repository.

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