Generating a leaflet web map with Folium

Creating a web map with your own data is becoming easier with every new web mapping library. Folium (http://folium.readthedocs.org/) is a small new Python project that can create a simple web map directly from your Python code, leveraging the leaflet JavaScript mapping library. This is still more than one line, but with under 20 lines of Python code, you can have Folium generate a nice web map for you.

Getting ready

Folium requires the Jinja2 template engine alongside Pandas for data binding. The nice part about this is that both are simple to install using pip:

pip install jinja2
pip install pandas

Instructions on using Pandas are also found in Chapter 1, Setting Up Your Geospatial Python Environment.

How to do it...

1. Now make sure that you are in your /ch10/code/ folder to see the live example of Folium as follows:

   #!/usr/bin/env python
   # -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
   import folium
   import pandas as pd
   
   # define the polygons
   states_geojson = r'us-states.json'...