10. Save an entire QGIS project in a GeoPackage

Now we're going to prepare the whole project in a GeoPackage so we can easily share the data, styling, etc. with others.

1. Click to open a blank project.

2. Go to the Browser panel, expand the Malawi_GIS_data.gpkg GeoPackage and drag the layers to the map canvas.

3. Zoom to Malawi (some layers are much larger) by clicking right on the Geology layer in the Layers panel and choose Zoom to Layer.

4. Check if the on the fly projection is EPSG: 32736 (UTM Zone 36S/WGS-84). You can see this on the bottom right of the QGIS window. If there's another EPSG code (e.g. 4326), then click on the EPSG code and choose the correct one.

We can now save the QGIS project in the same GeoPackage so when you share the GeoPackage file others can open the project with QGIS.

5. In the main menu choose Project | Save To | GeoPackage...

6. In the Save project to GeoPackage dialogue browse the the Malawi_GIS_data.gpkg GeoPackage that we've created before. Type Malawi_Groundwater as the Project name and click OK.

Let's test if this works.

7. Go to the file explorer and copy the Malawi_GIS_data.gpkg to another folder e.g. Z:\Malawi2\ so we can test if the data and project are really portable.

8. In the main menu go to Project | Open From | GeoPackage...

9. In the Load project from GeoPackage dialogue use the button to browse to the new folder with the copy of the Malawi_GIS_data.gpkg file and choose the Malawi_Groundwater project. Click OK to open.

Now you'll see the project as we configured it and anyone who uses the GeoPackage file will see the same.

GeoPackage project

In the next tutorial we're going to further process this data in QGIS.