Get your PostGIS data ready for Mapbox Studio

This guide will outline two methods for preparing data from your PostGIS database to upload to Mapbox Studio:

1. Export your data with QGIS — connect QGIS to your PostGIS database and save selected tables as Shapefiles.
2. Query and export your data with ogr2ogr — query your database and create GeoJSON files.

This guide will use QGIS, a free, open source GIS. Download and install QGIS before getting started.

If you prefer interacting with your PostGIS database via a graphical user interface, we recommend using QGIS to connect to your database to export your data. If you're comfortable writing your own queries, skip to the next section.

Launch QGIS and select Layer > Add PostGIS Layers from the toolbar.

After the Add PostGIS Table(s) dialog pops up, click the New button to set up your database connection.

Now enter:

• A name for this connection.
• The host name. The default is localhost.
• Port. The default is 5432.
• Your PostGIS database name.
• The username for the database.

Click the Test Connection button to make sure you are synced up, then click OK.

Back in the Add PostGIS Table(s) dialog box, click the Connect button to connect to your local database.

You should see a label appear in the Schema column. The label in the screenshot below is public. Click the arrow next to the label to expand the nested table values. Next, click to select the tables you want to show in your project.

When you're finished, click the Add button on the bottom left of the dialog box.

You should now be able to see your data visualized in QGIS.

Next, export your data as a Shapefile so you can upload it to Mapbox Studio later. Make sure your Layers panel is visible in QGIS by checking Layers under the View > Panels tab.

From the Layers panel, right-click on your data layer, then click Save As...

This will open the Save vector layer as... panel. Make sure the Format is set to ESRI Shapefile. Next, click the Browse button to navigate to the folder where you wish to save your file locally. Once you've navigated to your desired destination directory, create a new empty folder to house your shapefiles and give it a name. Select your new folder, then click OK.

In QGIS, a light blue bar will quickly flash to show that your save is completed. You can now navigate to that folder on your local machine to retrieve your data.

Navigate to the folder with your saved Shapefiles. Right-click on the folder containing all the files that are part of your Shapefile and Compress or zip this entire folder.

To upload Shapefiles to Mapbox Studio they must be zipped and cannot be larger than 270MB.

If prefer using the command line instead of QGIS, you can use GDAL's ogr2ogr utility to convert your data format. Using ogr2ogr and some SQL, you can also query your database.

Decide what data you wish to display on your map. In this example, the PostGIS database is loaded with Natural Earth data. Use the command psql -d natural_earth followed by \dt to enter your database and view the tables it contains:

psql -d natural_earth \
  \dt;

The example code below queries all the columns in tables named ne_10m_minor_islands table.

  \d+ ne_10m_minor_islands;

With one command you can convert your data into GeoJSON format, re-project from EPSG:3857 to EPSG:4326, save the new GeoJSON file as minor_islands.json, and query specific tables with SQL.

ogr2ogr -f GeoJSON \
  -t_srs EPSG:4326 -s_srs EPSG:3857 \
  minor_islands.json \
  "PG:host=localhost dbname=natural_earth user=postgres" \
  -sql "select * from ne_10m_minor_islands";

You now have your tables in GeoJSON format and they're ready to upload to Mapbox Studio!

You are now ready to upload your data! Read our article on Uploading data to your Mapbox account for more information.

If you've exported global data files or data that may exceed the 270 MB limit for uploading into Mapbox Studio, read our articles on Preparing large data files for Mapbox Studio.