Publish QGIS Maps on the Web with Kumoy

Introduction

Have you ever wanted to publish a map made in QGIS on the web, just as it is?

This article shows how to publish a QGIS map as a web map for free with a service called “Kumoy.”

What is Kumoy?

Kumoy (pronounced “kumoi”) is a cloud service for QGIS that provides seamless integration between QGIS and the web. With the QGIS plugin, you upload maps and data to the cloud and view them on the web.

An uploaded map keeps the style you set in QGIS, so its biggest strength is that you can publish the map you made as a web map as is. Kumoy is especially handy when you want to use a finished QGIS map outside your own computer.

The basic features are free, so this article uses them to show how to publish a map.

To learn more about Kumoy, see the following article.

Set up Kumoy

Create an account

To use Kumoy, create a free Kumoy account with a Google account or an email address. Go to the Kumoy website, click Log in or Get started free, and follow the prompts to create the account.

If you create the account with an email address, Kumoy sends a verification code to the address you registered.

If the code does not arrive, check whether:

• it went to your spam folder
• you entered the email address correctly
• your company or organization's server is blocking it

Then click Resend code. If the code still does not arrive, try registering with a different address.

For detailed steps, see the “Getting Started with Kumoy” section of the Kumoy documentation.

Create an organization and a project

Once the account is ready, create an organization. You need an organization on every plan. In the web UI, open Select an organization at the bottom left and choose New Organization.

If you upgrade to the Business plan or higher, members of the same organization can share maps and data with each other.

After creating the organization, click Create new project at the top right of the web UI. A project is like a folder for managing maps and data.

Your account is now ready.

Install the QGIS plugin

To upload maps and data from QGIS to the cloud, or to sync cloud data into QGIS, use the dedicated plugin (extension).

The Kumoy plugin is registered in the official QGIS plugin repository, so you can install it directly from QGIS. From the menu bar, choose Plugins → Manage and Install Plugins to open the Plugin Manager, search for “kumoy,” and install the plugin that appears.

The installed plugin appears in the QGIS Browser panel.

To learn more about installing plugins, see the following article.

Log in to Kumoy from the QGIS plugin

After you create the account and install the plugin, log in to Kumoy from QGIS. In the Browser panel, right-click Kumoy and click Login.

When the dialog opens, click the Login button and sign in with the account you created.

After you log in, the Select Project dialog appears. A project is like a folder for managing maps and data, and you can create one from either the web or the QGIS plugin.

For detailed steps, see the “Install the Kumoy Plugin for QGIS” and “Select an Organization and Project in QGIS” sections of the Kumoy documentation.

Upload data from QGIS to the cloud

With Kumoy, you can upload an existing map to the cloud, data included, and publish it as a web map.

Here, you upload a map made from the “School Data” published on the National Land Numerical Information Download Service. The data is processed, color-coded by category for each school classification code, and overlaid on the Pale Map.

To upload the map, expand Kumoy in the Browser panel and right-click Maps. From the menu that appears, select Save Current Project As.

Only the Name is required to upload. You can change the map information later, so when you publish the map to the public, be sure to also enter the Description and the data source in Attribution.

When the project contains local data, as in this example, the following dialog appears. If you are fine with uploading the data to the cloud, click Yes to continue.

Besides creating a map directly from local data, as in this example, you can also upload only the data to Kumoy first and then create the map from the data in the cloud. You can choose which data to manage in the cloud and which to keep local, so you can set things up to suit your use.

Layers uploaded to Kumoy show a logo mark at the right end, so you can tell local layers from data synced from the cloud at a glance.

Check the saved map in the web UI

After the upload finishes, check the map in a web browser.

In the Browser panel, right-click Kumoy and select Select Project.

Right-click the project that contains the uploaded map and select Open in Web App. Your web browser opens.

In the browser, you can view the finished map with its style applied under Map, and check each dataset on its own under Vector.

To check the finished map, click the name of the map you created under Map.

The web map opens with the same look as the style you set in QGIS. You can check layer information, as in the QGIS Layers panel, and click a feature to see its attributes.

To share the map, click the Share button, set the map to Public, and send the link that is issued. Anyone with the link can access the map.

Conclusion

With Kumoy, you can publish a map made in QGIS as a web map just as it is. Maps that several people need to share, such as hazard maps, or maps you want to zoom in and out of to check every detail, work well as interactive web maps.

The official documentation covers many topics beyond the ones in this article. To bring your QGIS maps to more people, give Kumoy a try.

Data sources

• GSI Tiles Pale Map (Geospatial Information Authority of Japan)
• National Land Numerical Information “School Data (nationwide, fiscal year 2023, Reiwa 5)” (Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism)