Learn how to make QGIS Plugins with AI coding tools (video)

I recently published a post on my experience using Cursor to create a new QGIS plugin. It seems to have inspired a few people, and so I decided to record a couple videos to try to show everyone exactly the process to do it. I’ve felt that being able to build things like QGIS Plugins has been life-changing, and so I just wanted to help demystify the process. And I’ve never really done any video recordings, but am inspired by Qiusheng Wu and Matt Forrest so I thought I’d give it a try. I’m quite confident I’ll never get as good as they are, but it was fun to give it a try.

The first video takes you all the way through making a first functional plugin. Lately I’ve been really enjoying using Planet Insights Platform, and so I decided to center the plugin around using the Planet Sandbox Data that is available for anyone to explore. But it’s just an example, and indeed I encourage you to ‘scratch your own itch’ and build something that makes it easier to do something you often do.

I then made a follow-up video on how to actually share your plugin with others. It goes a bit into how to use GitHub, plus how to first publish your plugin there. And then it also takes you through how to publish on the QGIS Plugin Web Portal, which in turn makes it so anyone can just install your plug-in directly from within QGIS.

And you can even see the plugin I made online and install it into your QGIS!

But it’s still marked ‘experimental’ since it’s not that great (yet). I’m hoping to find time to expand it and make it a useful little tool.

If you’ve found these videos helpful do let me know — I’d likely be up to make more if there’s interest. Though I think I may pivot a bit to web applications, as I really like the potential there to really tailor applications to be used by anyone.