Book Image

Python Geospatial Development - Third Edition

By : Erik Westra
Book Image

Python Geospatial Development - Third Edition

By: Erik Westra

Overview of this book

Geospatial development links your data to locations on the surface of the Earth. Writing geospatial programs involves tasks such as grouping data by location, storing and analyzing large amounts of spatial information, performing complex geospatial calculations, and drawing colorful interactive maps. In order to do this well, you’ll need appropriate tools and techniques, as well as a thorough understanding of geospatial concepts such as map projections, datums, and coordinate systems. This book provides an overview of the major geospatial concepts, data sources, and toolkits. It starts by showing you how to store and access spatial data using Python, how to perform a range of spatial calculations, and how to store spatial data in a database. Further on, the book teaches you how to build your own slippy map interface within a web application, and finishes with the detailed construction of a geospatial data editor using the GeoDjango framework. By the end of this book, you will be able to confidently use Python to write your own geospatial applications ranging from quick, one-off utilities to sophisticated web-based applications using maps and other geospatial data.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Python Geospatial Development Third Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Setting up a database


Now that we have installed the necessary software, let's see how we can use PostGIS to create and set up a spatial database. We will start by creating a Postgres user account, creating a database, and setting up the user to access that database, and then we will enable the PostGIS spatial extension for our database.

Creating a Postgres user account

Our first task is to set up a Postgres user, who will own the database we create. While you might have a user account on your computer that you use for logging in and out, the PostgreSQL user is completely separate from this account and is used only within Postgres. You can set up a PostgreSQL user with the same name as your computer username, or you can give it a different name if you prefer.

Note

Note that a user is sometimes referred to as a "role" in the Postgres manual.

To create a new PostgreSQL user, type the following command:

% createuser -P <username>

Tip

Obviously, replace <username> with whatever name you...