Also Available: Download QGIS for Mac. Data RecoveryMiniTool Power Data Recovery Free Edition 9.2. QGIS is an official project of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo). It runs on Linux, Unix, Mac OSX, Windows and Android and supports numerous vector, raster, and database formats.
This tutorial presupposes you have installed QGIS for Mac. If not, full instructions and downloads are available on the KyngChaos page. Obtaining a GIS package from a website called “kyngchaos” sounds dodgy, rest assured that it is the method approved by the QGIS developers themselves.
You may have already performed some of these steps; there is no need to repeat them if you have done so.
- Install Homebrew for mac if you have not done so already. Homebrew has great utility beyond QGIS.
- Install wine using homebrew
brew install wine - Install XQuartz. XQuartz is a windowing system (if you know unix, it’s X) for Mac. If you are using an old Mac, it is probably already installed, but updating to the new version will not hurt. XQuartz is required because it is used as the windowing system for Microsoft Windows and Linux applications.
- Download and unzip lastools. Remember where you unzipped it.
- You’re almost done. Start QGIS. Select Processing/Options. In the Providers section scroll to “Tools for LiDAR Data”. Fill out the blanks:
- LASTools folder:
pathtolastoolsdirectory - Wine Folder:
usrlocalbin
Note: this is the default directory for the homebrew wine installation. If you want to check to make sure it’s correct, open a terminal (ie, Terminal app) and type: which wine The output will tell you what to type in the box. Remove the ‘wine’ part of the entry.
- Restart QGIS. When you open the toolbox, you should have all the LAStools available in your toolbox.
Note: When you open one of the LAStools for the first time you will see a large number of error messages, etc. These are from wine and can be safely ignored.
Subsequent tool usage will be faster and have fewer errors, but there may still be some. If there are errors, they can be safely ignored as long as the LAStools are functioning.
Another note: When using some of the LAStools (like lasviewer), you will note that the processing toolbox dialogue does not disappear, making it look like QGIS has crashed. This is not the case – the wine window (ie, that which is displaying the lidar data) is part of the tool, and the processing dialogue box will close once you close the lidar window.
New for QGIS 3.x
LASTools are no longer enabled by default. To enable LASTools, follow these steps:
- Go to Plugins/Manage and Install Plugins
- Search for LASTools and install the plugin
- Once that’s done, LASTools (as opposed to “Tools for LiDAR Data”) will appear in the Processing Options, where you must check the “enable” button and follow the steps above.
We now have signed packages for macOS. You can find these packages published on the official QGIS download page at http://download.qgis.org.
In addition to being a very powerful and user-friendly open source GIS application, QGIS can be installed on different operating systems: MS Windows, macOS, various flavours of Linux and FreeBSD.
Volunteers help with generating the installers for those platforms. The work is highly valuable and the scale of effort put into packaging over the years is often underappreciated. QGIS has also grown significantly over the years and so has its complexity to package relevant libraries and 3rd party tools to the end-users.
QGIS has been packaged on OSX/macOS for many years, making it one of the few GIS applications you can use on this platform. This is largely thanks to the tireless work of William Kyngesburye (https://www.kyngchaos.com/software/qgis/) who has shouldered the task of compiling QGIS and its dependencies and offering them as disk images on the official QGIS website. The packages for each new release are available within days for all supported macOS versions.
Unlike most other operating systems, macOS can only be run on Apple hardware. This is a barrier for developers on other platforms who wish to compile and test their code on macOS. For other platforms, QGIS developers have automated packaging, not only for the major releases but also for daily code snapshots (aka nightly or master builds). Availability of the daily packages has allowed testers to identify platform-specific issues, well before the official release.
Apple also has a system of software signing so that users can verify if the packages are securely generated and signed by the developers. Up until now, signed macOS packages were not available, resulting in users who are installing QGIS needing to go into their security preferences and manually allow the QGIS application to be run.
In October 2018, Lutra Consulting started their work on packaging QGIS for macOS. The work has been based on OSGeo tap on Homebrew. Homebrew is a ‘bleeding edge’ package manager similar to those provided by Gentoo or Arch Linux. The packages by Lutra bundle the various libraries and resources on which QGIS depends into a single QGIS.app application bundle. The packages were made available in late 2018 for QGIS official releases and master. QGIS Mac users have eagerly tested and reported various issues and the majority of them were resolved in early 2019.
Qgis For Mac M1
Following the successful launch of the prototype packages and in discussion with other developers, it was agreed to transfer the ownership of the packaging infrastructure and scripts (https://github.com/qgis/QGIS-Mac-Packager) to QGIS.org. Using the new infrastructure and OSGeo Apple developers certificate, all QGIS ‘disk images’ (installers) have been available since late May 2019.
What are the main difference between the new installers and the ones offered by Kyngchaos? The new installer offers:
- 3 clicks to install: download, accept Terms & Conditionss, drop to /Application
- All dependencies (Python, GDAL, etc) are bundled within the disk image
- Signed by OSGeo Apple certificate
- Availability of nightly builds (master)
- Scripts for bundling and packaging are available on a public repository
- Possibility of installing multiple versions (e.g. 3.4 LTR, 3.8 and master) side-by-side
There are some known issues:
- Lack of support for macOS versions earlier than 10.13 (https://github.com/qgis/QGIS-Mac-Packager/issues/6)
- Issues with some GRASS modules relient on Python 2.x
For a full list, see: https://github.com/qgis/QGIS-Mac-Packager
We hope that by providing the new installers, macOS users will have a better experience in installing and using QGIS. Ideally, with the availability of nightly builds and being more accessible to new users, more software bugs and issues will be reported and this will help to improve QGIS overall.
Qgis Tutorial
Maintaining and supporting macOS costs more compared with other platforms. As QGIS is one of the only viable GIS applications for macOS users in an enterprise environment, we encourage you and your organisation to become a sustaining member to help assure the continued availability and improvement of the macOS packages in the long term.
Qgis 3.4 Download
In future we plan to migrate the packaging process to use Anaconda QGIS packages as the source for package binaries. We also would like to integrate macOS builds into the Travis-CI automated testing that happens whenever a new GitHub pull request is submitted so that we can validate that the macOS packages do not get any regressions when new features are introduced.
Free Qgis For Mac
With this work, we now have nightly builds of the upcoming release (‘master’) branch available for all to use on macOS. We now have signed packages and we have an automated build infrastructure that will help to ensure that macOS users always have ready access to new versions of QGIS as they become available. You can find these packages published on the official QGIS download page at http://download.qgis.org. A huge thanks to the team at Lutra Consulting for taking this much-needed work, and to William Kyngesburye for the many years that he has contributed towards the macOS/OSX QGIS packaging effort!