Creating custom geoprocessing scripts using Python

In Chapter 5, Spatial Analysis, we used the tools of Processing Toolbox to analyze our data. We are not limited to these tools, however, as we can also write our own. We can expand processing with our own scripts. The advantages of processing scripts over normal Python scripts, such as the ones we saw in the previous section, are as follows:

• Processing automatically generates a graphical user interface for the script to configure the script parameters
• Processing scripts can be used in Graphical modeler to create geoprocessing models

Writing your first processing script

We will now create our first script that fetches some layer information. The processing has been completely...