nstoykov / mergin

Store and track changes to your geo-data

Store and track changes to your geo-data

About

Mergin is a web platform for storage and synchronisation of geospatial projects across multiple users and devices (desktop and mobile). The platform is especially useful when you need:

• Mobile data collection. If you need to capture location of assets (and their attributes) or update an existing database.

• Data sharing. No complicated setup of access by IT admins to get your data to colleagues or clients. Set up permissions and send invites with few clicks.

• Offline access. Work with data with no interruption even without constant Internet connection - sync any changes when you are back online.

• Collaborative editing. No more problems dealing with multiple copies of the same dataset in different versions - all changes are automatically consolidated in one place.

• Audit changes. Knowing who has changed what and when in a database is often important - Mergin keeps track of the history and allows to go back if needed.

• No coding required. Everything can be set up with no knowledge of programming.

Mergin organises all data in projects. A project in Mergin is a directory containing various data files - GeoPackages, QGIS project files, documents, pictures and more. As soon as a project is uploaded to Mergin, it can be easily accessed directly from the web, from QGIS or from iOS/Android via Input app.

Screenshots

Mergin web

Dashboard	Project files
Project version history	Project settings

Mergin in Input app

Mergin in QGIS

Features

• 🌍 Store data - GeoPackages, QGIS project files, GeoTIFFs, pictures or any other data easily
• 📱 Mobile devices - Great for working on field surveys, thanks to Input app based on QGIS, for iOS and Android
• 🌟 QGIS integration - Mergin plugin is available to help with project setup and seamless syncing within QGIS
• 👥 Multi-user editing - Changes to vector/attribute data from multiple users are automatically merged
• 📖 Data versioning - Keeping history of all changes, allowing to go back if needed
• 🔌 Offline editing - Clients do not need to be online all the time - only when syncing changes
• 🌱 Sharing with collaborators - Projects can be shared with other team members
• 🏰 Granular permissions - Decide who can read, write or manage projects
• 🌈 Web interface - Simple user interface to view and manage projects
• ⚡️ Fast - Efficient sync protocol transfering data between clients and server
• 🧑‍💻 Developer friendly - Mergin is open platform. CLI tools and client libraries available for Python and C++
• 📷 Sync images - Supporting sync of photos with common cloud storage using mergin-media-sync tool
• 💽 Sync with database - Supporting two-way sync of data with PostGIS using mergin-db-sync tool
• 👷‍♀️ Work packages - Split main database to smaller chunks for teams using mergin-work-packages tool

Mergin offers a unique combination of features that other tools do not provide out of the box:

• relational databases (such as PostGIS or Oracle) are great for keeping a central repository of spatial data, but offline access, versioning and sharing outside of a single organisation are complicated to set up.

• traditional storage products (like Dropbox or Google Drive) are great for storage of large amounts of data (pictures/videos) and offering offline access, but concurrent access to data (e.g. a single vector layer) is not going to work well.

Quick start

Try Mergin at https://public.cloudmergin.com/ - the SaaS service run by Lutra Consulting, the makers of Mergin.

Running with Docker

Run Mergin locally is easy. Adjust configuration in docker-compose.yml, e.g. replace 'fixme' entries and run with docker-compose:

$ docker-compose up
$ docker exec -it mergin-server flask init-db
$ docker exec -it mergin-server flask add-user admin topsecret --is-admin --email [email protected]
$ sudo chown -R  901:999 ./projects/
$ sudo chmod g+s ./projects/

Projects are saved locally in ./projects folder.

Admin users can additionally enter the admin interface available at /admin URL which provides management of users, projects and other bits of the Mergin instance.

Documentation

For user help and documentation, visit https://help.cloudmergin.com/ If you'd like to contribute and improve the documentation visit https://github.com/lutraconsulting/mergin-docs

For the Input mobile app, visit https://inputapp.io/ - with more documentation at https://help.inputapp.io/

Join our community chat
and ask questions!

Get in touch

If you need support, a custom deployment, extending the service capabilities and new features do not hesitate to contact us on [email protected]

Developers

Contributions are welcome!

More information for developers can be found in the dedicated development page.

Client side modules:

• Python client library + CLI
• C++ client library + CLI

More related tools:

• mergin-db-sync - set up two-way sync between Mergin and PostGIS database
• mergin-work-packages - split data for teams to work packages

Learn more about geodiff - the low-level library providing seamless merging of changes from multiple sources.

License

Mergin is open source and licensed under the terms of AGPL licence.