Saving a map to a project

Saving a project automatically can be useful for auto save features, or as part of a process to auto-generate projects from dynamically updated data. In this recipe, we'll save a QGIS project to a .qgs project file.

Getting ready

You will need to download the following zipped shapefile and extract it to your qgis_data directory in a subdirectory named ms:

https://github.com/GeospatialPython/Learn/raw/master/Mississippi.zip

How to do it...

We will create a simple QGIS project by loading a shapefile layer, then we'll access the project object, and save the map project to a file, as follows:

1. First, we need the Qt core library in the QGIS Python console:

           from PyQt4.QtCore import * 
   

2. Next, we load the shapefile and add it to the map:

           lyr = QgsVectorLayer("/qgis_data/ms/mississippi.shp",
                                "Mississippi", "ogr") 
           reg = QgsMapLayerRegistry.instance() 
           reg.addMapLayer(lyr) 
   

3. Then...