We are happy to announce that the PyQGIS Cookbook has received a complete overhaul and is now better than ever.

The PyQGIS Cookbook is a great source of information, not only for PyQGIS beginners or plugin developers, but also for C++ developers: it contains a lot of information about the internals of the QGIS API that you cannot really find anywhere else.

The main point addressed in this review were:

1. All the code snippets have been reviewed and put under automated test in CI. Before this revision, there were 62 tests. Now there are over 300 tested snippets.
2. A few snippets had to be updated because of changes in the QGIS API or because of the deprecation of methods (CRS handling in particular due to the proj6 switch).
3. Textual descriptions have been edited to update the contents where the API has substantially changed.
4. The material covering Python for QGIS Server has been reorganized and now includes new snippets and introductory texts about the new modules and OGC APIs architecture.

For the full summary, please refer to Alessandro Pasotti’s report on the PSC mailing list.

Thank you to Alessandro Pasotti for taking on this project and thank you to all our sponsor and donors who make this initiative possible!

We are proud to announce our new dedicated documentation of the QGIS Python API (also called PyQGIS) which is now available at https://qgis.org/pyqgis:

While the QGIS API has long been documented, Python developers in the past had to work with the general C++ documentation that wasn’t always straightforward to use. The new PyQGIS documentation presents the API in an accessible pythonic manner.

Of course, creating a good API documentation from source code in an automated way, is not trivial. A key challenge was to automatically create Python bindings files (or SIP files). A custom Perl script known as “sipify” now enables us to automatically integrate the C++ documentation into the Python bindings and keep them up to date. Another challenge was to create the documentation itself using Sphinx. Two detailed reports containing all the technical details of the first and second generation of the documentation are available if you want to learn more about the underlying architecture.

This has been a really important infrastructure project for QGIS that has been made possible by support from our donors and sponsors, as well as the generous in-kind contributions of our community members.